Blackened (6): One
by jtm1848
Summary: Trip confronts his archdemon.


– ONE –

**December 2**

"It's confirmed, Captain," Hoshi Sato said with amazement as the data readings scrolled across her monitor. "The transponder signal is still weak, but the computer's filtered it out from the background noise."

"You're sure of it?" Captain Archer didn't mean to doubt the young communications officer, but the discovery was so valuable—and so unexpected—that he had to make sure. If this was true—_if _this was true, he reminded himself—it just might be the lucky break they had been looking for. The break that would blow their pursuit of the Xindi weapon wide open.

"Yes, sir," Hoshi repeated. She traced the signal across the screen. "It's matching the transponder that you planted in the kemocite shipment."

Archer shook his head in amazement. "Send the course to the helm," he ordered promptly. "Tell Trip I want—"

"Captain." T'Pol's calibrated voice interposed before Archer could finish his thought.

Archer gritted his teeth, and turned to the Vulcan science officer. She wasn't prone to interrupting him, but he didn't want to hear anything that would interfere with their newfound luck. "What is it, Commander?" he asked at last, dreading the answer.

"As you know, Ensign Mayweather has been compiling a map of the spatial anomalies," T'Pol began. At the moment, Travis Mayweather was absent from his usual post at the helm, attending to duties elsewhere on the _Enterprise._

"Yes, I know, Commander," Archer replied carefully.

"The signal lies along the predicted edge of a dense distortion field," T'Pol explained. "If we follow the outer curvature, it will take several days' travel."

_Huh, _Archer thought. _I was expecting something worse. _"Can we cut through the distortion?" he asked. In recent weeks, the engineering crew had finally figured out how to protect the warp engines from the gravimetric instabilities.

T'Pol shook her head in approximation of the human gesture. "Our sensor scans indicate that the field in question is unusually dense," she answered. "The risk of catastrophic damage is significant."

_Okay, _Archer thought. _What next? _"How long to go around?"

"Depending on local variations in the field strength…" T'Pol ran the calculations. "Approximately four-point-three days, Captain. Not an unreasonable time," she hastened to add.

As eager as he was, Archer had to admit that the Vulcan's prudence made sense. As they entered their seventh month in the Delphic Expanse, a couple days logically made little difference, especially when compared to the safety of the _Enterprise_.

"All right," he decided. "We'll have to navigate the perimeter. But keep us as close as you can. Archer to engineering!" He hit the intercom button.

His chief engineer responded almost immediately. "Tucker here."

"We're going to be hugging the perimeter of a distortion field, Trip," Archer said.

"We've got the warp reactor buttoned up, sir," Charles 'Trip' Tucker answered. "We're as ready as we'll ever be."

"Acknowledged." Archer severed the connection. "Are you ready, T'Pol?"

"I've charted the primary curvature," she noted in response. "But the distortion seems to be prone to flares. We may not be able to avoid all of them."

"Understood, Commander. Hutch—" he turned to Travis' backup at the helm. "Take us along. Start at one-half impulse. Let's work our way up."

"Aye, sir," Ensign Hutchinson answered, and under his commands, the starship shifted back into action.

"Come to bearing two-seven-five-mark-eight!" T'Pol shouted in alarm. "Hard to port!"

The _Enterprise_shuddered from the sheering force of the rapid, twisting movement, sending the captain stumbling across the bridge. "Report!" he ordered.

"We grazed the perimeter, Captain," T'Pol answered, having already regained her poise. "No damage."

_This could be a long four-point-three days_, Archer reflected.

**December 6**

Despite several minor mishaps along the edge of the distortion field, three-point-seven days passed without serious incident. Captain Archer kept a steady rotation at the helm; the intense monitoring and rapid course changes wore down the pilots quickly, and each was restricted to two-hour stretches before yielding to their replacement. Characteristic of her Vulcan stamina, T'Pol stood double watches, spending fourteen and sixteen hours on the bridge at a time; and the captain made sure to man the usually-vacant engineering console, slaving its systems as a secondary science post.

Midway through day four, a massive shudder drove Archer from his ready room, through the brief, connecting corridor, and onto the bridge. "Report!" he demanded the second he emerged. The _Enterprise_shook again, knocking him into the tactical console.

"There's an anomaly flare directly ahead!" T'Pol announced, raising her voice over the turbulent noise. "It's still expanding!"

"Course change, Commander!" Archer sucked in air as he spoke. At least he hadn't broken any ribs.

"It's growing too rapidly!" T'Pol answered.

"Emergency stop!" Archer shouted. He pushed himself away from tactical and towards the helm as the ship shook again. "Brace for impact!"

From the front of the saucer, a sickening green wall tore through the _Enterprise_, twisting the very structure of its quantum existence. Through corridors and bulkheads, cabins and laboratories, it ripped through, fusing metals, rending circuitry, slicing reinforced bulkheads to pieces. As it hit the bridge, it flung the crew from their seats; the walls rippled and flexed, and Archer narrowly avoided being impaled _inside _a deck plate undergoing a state of flux.

The wave continued to pass through the ship, striking main engineering with unusual savagery. Panels exploded and conduits blew across the compartment; crewmen were knocked from their feet, and Ensign Navarro did a back flip over the upper railing, landing with a distinct crunching noise. In charge of the sudden chaos, Trip ran from station to station, trying to conduct an emergency shutdown of the warp reactor before the quantum tears caused a cascade reaction; the powerful magnetic fields flexed and stretched, growing and shrinking as reality changed around them.

"We're losing hull integrity!" Malcolm Reed called out, his hands clinging to the tactical computers with whitened knuckles. "I'm reading damage across the ship. Atmosphere's venting on D-deck!"

"Get us the hell out of here!" Archer ordered from the deck. He crawled along the plating, unable to stand in the vicious turbulence.

"The helm's not responding!" At the moment, Travis had the controls.

"We've been completely enveloped!" T'Pol called out, overlapping on the shouted commands and orders flying across the bridge.

"Travis, get us out of here!" Archer ordered again. "T'Pol, try to raise engineering!"

A massive _bang _sounded throughout the ship, knocking the crew from their feet once again, but in the aftermath, the shaking slowly ceased and the _Enterprise_steadied.

Archer warily climbed to his feet, noting with disgust that his left leg could not bear its regular weight. "Report, T'Pol?"

"The flare appears to have passed, Captain," she answered. Her delicate brow was furrowed as she perused the sensor readings.

"Travis, do we have helm control back?" Archer asked next. He held his arms out for stability.

"Some, Captain," the youthful ensign answered. "I can't do any precision flying, although."

"Set a course directly away from the distortion," Archer ordered. "What's our best speed?"

Travis checked the controls. "One-quarter impulse, sir."

"Make it one-quarter impulse, then." At that speed, it would take days to reach a safe distance. "Malcolm, begin compiling a damage report. I…I will be in sickbay."

Hours later, with his leg wrapped tightly and pumped full of drugs, Captain Archer found himself in the primary port armory, inspecting the damage with Lieutenant Reed. "Targeting sensors are down," Malcolm reported. He jogged sprightly through the debris strewn along the floor. Archer, lugging a half-deadened leg, didn't even try to keep pace.

"We're damn lucky the torpedoes were all locked down," Malcolm added. "If one of them had detonated, we'd have been goners."

"Phase cannons?" Archer asked, rapidly cataloguing the information.

"Power relays are completely blown," Malcolm answered. Half a dozen technicians were at work in this armory bay alone, repairing circuitry and conduits; it was a safe guess that half of those were at work on the phase cannon power relays. The ship needed its engines and weaponry—the abilities to flee and fight, respectively. "They haven't even got enough power to light a camp fire."

"How long to fix them?"

Malcolm came to a stop in front of the bay's primary control console. It was completely dead; not a single control was lit up, and the plasticine sheeting was lying in shattered fragments on the deck before it. "I couldn't even guess until we get the control systems online, sir. We haven't even sorted out all of the damage yet. How is Ensign Navarro doing?"

"He didn't make it," Archer replied grimly.

"Coffee, black," Malcolm ordered, glad that at least one system on the ship was still functioning. As commanded, the beverage dispenser shot a stream of hot, black liquid into the waiting mug.

"No tea?" Trip Tucker spoke from behind the tactical chief.

Malcolm cupped the mug in his hands and let the caffeinated aroma waft into his weary face. "Yeah, and no crumpets either. I need all the caffeine I can get." He took a sip of the hot beverage. "What's the status in engineering?"

"Bad," Trip answered. With systems down across the ship, Chef had dug pre-packaged cold-cut sandwiches out of stasis. _At least it's not emergency rations,_ Trip thought gratefully. A corned-beef sandwich graced his dinner platter beside a package of freeze-dried cranberries. "How's the armory?"

"Worse," Malcolm replied dryly. "Phlox made me take a break; I've been down there for nearly twelve hours, without interruption. I heard about Ensign Navarro—he was a good officer."

Trip's face grew long. "Yeah, but that didn't do much to save him. It seems like we keep dropping these days, one at a time."

"Well," Malcolm answered, taking another sip of the hot coffee, "it's a long road to Tipperary."

Trip stared at his friend in confusion.

**Early morning, December 7**

"I haven't seen you in a while," Trip said as T'Pol materialized behind his shoulder. "But as long as you're here, maybe you can give me a hand." He was buried elbow-deep in a partially-dissected anti-matter injector, unable to move more than a couple centimeters either way; one hand was holding a flux regulator in place while another was adjusting the phase compensator.

"What do you need?" T'Pol asked formally, approaching with masked unease.

Trip spoke under his armpit. "Can you go over to the monitor and watch the phase variation? Let me know when it hits point-zero-two-eight-one." T'Pol did as asked, happy to put even an extra meter between them.

"It seems like you've been avoiding me," Trip continued nonchalantly, as though he wasn't engaged in precision calibration of the most potent explosive substance known to humanity.

"I have had duties to attend to," T'Pol replied pointedly.

"Well, yeah, but you've cancelled all of our massage therapy sessions for two weeks now," Trip answered. "Do you really expect me to believe that you've been busy every night?"

"The variation is at point-zero-three-four-two," T'Pol answered. "The captain asked for an update on your repairs."

"Damnit," Trip growled. "Can you run a quick diagnostic on the sensor? The variation should be tighter than that." Lengthy hands-on experience had taught the engineer how to estimate the variation by the vibrations under his fingertips.

"Checking," T'Pol replied. "The sensor is in optimum condition. Variation is down to point-zero-three-two-zero."

"That's something, at least." Trip fiddled with the flux regulator as he spoke. "Tell the captain that three of the injectors are burnt out, and one of the restrictor coils is completely fried."

"How long until we have warp?"

"We have the replacement parts," Trip answered. The flow was humming more smoothly now. "We still have a few more diagnostics to run on the support systems, although. It'll be twelve, maybe thirteen hours." He held his breath and released his grip on the flux regulator. "How's the reading?"

"Dropping steadily," T'Pol replied. "Now holding at point-zero-two-seven-four." Several microns to spare.

"Thanks for the assist, T'Pol," Trip grunted as he twisted his body out from the machinery. The systems in question were not easy to access, and it took a contortionist act for him to emerge, covered in liquids and soot. "Is there anything else?" He wiped his hands on his soiled coveralls, accomplishing little in the process.

"No, Commander," T'Pol answered. "Keep me informed of your progress." She turned to leave.

"T'Pol." Trip's hesitant voice caught her in mid-step. "We need to talk, T'Pol."

She tilted her head. "Do you have something additional to report?"

"No, not about that." Trip sighed miserably. "I was referring to…well, to what happened…between us. In your quarters. The last time we met," he finished, fumbling for words. "It's been two weeks, T'Pol. We need to talk about it."

T'Pol nodded calmly. "I suppose I should thank you."

Trip's face furrowed in confusion. "No need to thank me," he replied. He had no idea what to make of her comment.

"For facilitating my exploration of human sexuality," T'Pol explained. "You see, in Vulcan society, romantic relations are highly logical." Of course, the _pon farr _was anything _but _logical, but Trip didn't know that. "The mating patterns of other species are of great academic interest for us."

Trip hadn't been sure what to expect, but this definitely wasn't it. "Wait…it sounds like you're saying it was just some sort of…experiment."

"And you were very cooperative, Commander."

If Trip didn't know better, he would've sworn that it was an emotional barb. "So I was just…a lab rat?" He was at a loss for words. "I thought…I don't know, T'Pol, I thought it was something…"

"It would be just like a human to attach emotional sentiment to a purely physical act," T'Pol replied primly.

Trip felt his thoughts swirling. "I'm not getting emotional, T'Pol, I just…I don't know," he ended with frustration. _What was I expecting? I should've known better than to get attached to a blasted emotionless automaton. _He may have had his share of past partners, but at the same time, Trip wasn't the love-them-and-leave-them type. That honor was reserved, oddly enough, for Malcolm.

"I'm sorry if I offended you," T'Pol added. Her face was obtuse, like it was cast in plaster; no hint of any feeling was present in her eyes.

Trip could've sworn that the world was growing darker before him. "Don't mention it…in fact, never mention it again."

Captain's Log, December 8, 2153. With our repairs largely completed, the _Enterprise_is once again on the trail of the transponder signature.

Before the _Enterprise_was an ordinary, G-class star, unremarkable in every respect; suspiciously average, as it matched Earth's star almost to the slightest detail. The precision and exactitude seemed downright demonic to Travis; were the Xindi so intent on destroying Earth that they had even measured the characteristics of its star? Were they planning to annihilate the entire solar _system_?

With one eye on the star, Travis followed his navigational readings with the other. "Two hundred million kilometers, sir," he called out. It was comparable to the orbit of Mars, but there was nothing comparable to Mars itself in this alien system; in fact, there was nothing comparable at all, other than the similarity of the star. Where Earth's system held a ring system of planets, planetoids, and asteroid belts, this one was nothing more than a single unending asteroid field; denser in spots, with larger asteroids, perhaps indicating where a planet had failed to form.

"That's close enough, Travis," Archer said from over Travis' shoulder. The captain was in his customary standing location just behind the helm. "We don't want to give ourselves away."

"Aye, sir," Travis answered. It was an ideal system to hide in; many of the floating rocks had strong magnetic fields, and it was a simple matter for him to cloak the _Enterprise_within.

"It's a G-type star system," T'Pol confirmed from science. "Well over a hundred planetoids. None appear large enough to be a full-fledged planet."

"Any biosigns?" Archer asked hopefully.

"There's a great deal of debris in the system," T'Pol replied archly. "We would have to get considerably closer to the signal."

"Travis?"

Mayweather was waiting for the order. "Yes, sir. I can shield our approach by using the penumbras of the asteroids," he answered excitedly.

"Do it," Archer ordered, and the bridge fell silent while Travis focused on his controls. Intent on maintaining their secrecy, he carefully checked each move twice-over before making it; as the _Enterprise _slid from one protective umbra to another, sometimes moving backwards in order to maintain cover, Travis kept their exposure minimal. He couldn't decide if it was more nerve-racking or energizing.

"We're within sensor range," T'Pol spoke up after an hour of creeping through the asteroid field.

"Bring us to a stop, Travis," Archer ordered, and the navigator eased the starship into a tight parking orbit over an unusually-dense rock. The strong magnetic fields would hide their presence, even on a direct line of sight. "What do you have, T'Pol?"

T'Pol posted the sensor imagery on the main viewscreen. It was filled with static; Travis squinted his eyes, trying to make out definable shapes as the science officer worked to refine the image with additional sensor scans. Slowly, he was able to identify a small, rocky planetoid, maybe the size of a small moon. Four smaller objects seemed to be moving across the face of the planetoid.

In orbit were four Xindi vessels.

Unwilling to leave the bridge, Archer called his senior staff for a consultation in the rear mission-briefing alcove.

T'Pol promptly commandeered the wall monitor, posting an image of one of the many rocks. "Many of the moons show evidence of extensive weapons bombardment," she reported, eliciting false-light coloring on the picture to show the scars and craters. Travis didn't know if this particular planetoid was chosen at random, or as a specific example, but its surface was deeply pummeled by repeated weapons strikes.

"Why would the Xindi attack an uninhabited system?" Hoshi asked, confused by the evidence.

"It wasn't an attack. At least, not in that sense," Archer answered. He pulled up the image of a second pummeled asteroid. "It looks like a practice range. Like Vieques Island, back on Earth."

"Vieques was inhabited," Malcolm observed dryly. "Otherwise, although, it does seem to fit. It might also serve as a testing range."

"No," Travis said suddenly. A cold thought had dawned on him. "It's not Vieques Island; it's Bikini Atoll."

"I'm not familiar with the reference," T'Pol admitted.

"I am," Archer replied softly. No one else seemed willing to answer as they exchanged uncomfortable looks. "On Earth, back in the early days of nuclear weapons, our people tested live nuclear cores out in the open. When the first thermonuclear device was created, its makers chose an isolated atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The area is still off-limits." And after the nuclear holocausts of the Final World War, the atoll's restricted status was rather significant.

"I see," T'Pol replied evenly. Her own people, deep in their past, had poisoned their planet with nuclear detonations as well. "So you believe this is some kind of proving ground."

"The kemocite transponder _is _up ahead," Malcolm confirmed. "The fuel for the weapon is here, and this does pretty clearly appear to be a test range. It's likely on a final run-through."

"If they are getting ready to test it, then we're running out of time," Archer added unhappily.

"We can't go in with a frontal assault." Malcolm's face expressed his pain. "Our weapons are still damaged, and we're outnumbered four to one."

Travis pushed himself forward. "With all due respect, sir, we need to get a closer look first. We need to confirm that the weapon _is _here before we can decide on an assault."

"What do you propose we do, Ensign?" Malcolm snorted. "Fly up to them and ask them what they're doing?"

"No, Lieutenant." Travis shook his head. "But with all these rocks, this system is a natural for hiding in. I'm sure I can get us closer."

"How much closer?" Archer asked skeptically.

"Close enough," Travis answered confidently. He knew that he could do it.

"Very well, Travis," Archer decided. "You have the helm; I want to be able to see the whites of their eyes—or whatever color their eyes are."

The weapon was massive.

Dozens of kilometers in diameter, it dwarfed many of the asteroids in the fractured system. It was spherical; a dense, metal shell protected the delicate machinery within. A twirling array of gyroscopic rings rotated about the exterior at bewildering speeds, sweeping over the surface in a dizzying dance of precise movement. It was an instrument of destruction, pure and simple; it beckoned to mind memories of deaths unseen but foretold, lives extinguished and existence ended. It was _the weapon_: the weapon that would deliver salvation to the Xindi people.

Deep inside the weapon's core, two highly-ranked Xindi-primates were gathered in the control center. Both were deeply irritated; like any test run, this one had run into unexpected delays, but they knew the final test would run within the hour.

"Degra, what's the delay this time?" The first primate gave voice to his irritation. His skin was a shade darker than the scientist's, but he shared the same prominent widow's-peak hairline that was characteristic of all Xindi primates. This man was Depac; he was a member of the great Xindi Council, representing the primate branch of the Xindi Diaspora. He was a powerful man, and knew it, but was not a fool: the incredible physics involved in the weapon could not be hurried.

"Stand by!" Degra shouted out as he ran from console to console. The humans knew of Degra; they had seen him back in August, a fact of which the scientist was still unaware. Considered to have one of the most brilliant minds in the Diaspora, he had been pressed into service shortly after the Council learned of the cataclysmic threat from the humans; a physicist by trade, Degra put his skills to work to design the most destructive weapon he could envision, a monstrosity capable of rending the very heart of a planet.

"We have been standing by for nearly an hour!" Depac snapped. "Before that, it was for an entire day! What is taking so long?"

Degra gritted his teeth. He had extraordinary leeway with the Councilor, but it wouldn't help to get cross now. "We're confirming final power readings," he explained. "There was a fluctuation in one of the relay conduits. I want to be certain that it's fixed before we proceed."

"How much longer?" Depac growled.

"Now," Degra replied. "Begin the initiation sequence!"

Deep within the belly of the weapon, loud noises reverberated through massive struts as the power core hummed to life, thrumming with the strength to end civilizations. Balls of blue light shot up and down, intermixed with the crackling, ear-splitting bolts of green lightning. At the terminus, servo-actuators slid smoothly into action, opening the threshold into the pre-fire chamber.

An alarm went off.

"Hold the sequence!" Degra ordered immediately. After long months of preparation, he knew every warning siren; this was not a problem with the weapon, but he had to secure it nonetheless.

"What is it?" Depac demanded.

"There was a blip on the sensors," one of the many technicians answered. The techies ringed the control chamber, standing watch at every post. "For a second, it looked like an unidentified ship."

_Somehow, _Degra thought, _it makes sense. _"Is it the humans?" he asked, jogging over to the appropriate display.

"It's gone now, sir," the technician answered. "I'm trying to clear up the scan. We can't make anything out right now."

"Degra!" Depac bellowed irately. "What's going on?"

"We're securing the weapon, Councilor," Degra shot back. "We have to identify that reading before we can do anything!"

Never content to sit still, Captain Archer hovered over T'Pol and perused the readings as they streamed into her science console. Some of them he understood; _others not so much, _he admitted silently. In one corner, a monitor showed real-life imagery of the object dead ahead. It was large, it was spherical, and it was fuzzy; the naked eye could make out little more, but Hoshi had confirmed that the kemocite transponder signature was coming from within.

"It's emitting high levels of radiation," T'Pol observed, reading the data lines straight from the raw sensor feed. "It likely contains an extremely potent power plant, perhaps even a 'juiced' matter/anti-matter reactor." Her lengthy stint among humans had taught T'Pol some of the vernacular.

"That doesn't help us much," Archer replied. "Is it a _weapon_?"

T'Pol tilted her head. "Anything that generates this much power can be used as a weapon, sir," she answered. "If you are inquiring about its primary purpose, however, that will take further study."

Archer sighed. "Can you at least confirm that it's Xindi?"

"Yes, sir," T'Pol acknowledged. "The radiation contains the same quantum signature as the probe-weapon that attacked Earth. It is safe to assume that it is Xindi technology."

Not for the first time, Archer reminded himself that he had _chosen _T'Pol. "Lieutenant," he said, turning to Malcolm, "what about tactical options? Is there any way we can get in there, and take this thing out?"

Malcolm's lips grew thin. "Pretty scarce, Captain. My repair crews have been running into endless problems with the weapons. It'll be another two days before we can even scratch their hulls."

"If they're here to test that damned thing, we might not _have _two days!" Archer snapped, then shook his head tiredly. "Why don't you go below to hurry the repairs? I need those weapons online _now._"

"Aye, sir." Reed summoned his bridge backup and left. With scarcely a second of down time, Ensign Rahimi emerged to take over tactical.

"Captain," T'Pol said softly. Archer hunched down to consult with her. "Even with our weapons at full strength, we would stand little chance of successfully destroying that object. With four Xindi warships in the vicinity, we wouldn't even get close."

"I know, Commander," Archer replied, equally _sotto voce_. "But I want every option we can get."

"Captain, I do not believe we should be in a rush to destroy it." Archer's expression was puzzled, but T'Pol was prepared to explain. "First, we need to verify that it _is _the weapon; second, it would be preferable to allow them to run their tests. We can watch from a protected location and gauge its destructive power."

"Good thinking, Commander," Archer replied. "But keep a close eye on that thing; if it starts to leave the system, we might have no choice but to take it out."

"Report!" Depac ordered. There was too much chatter for him to follow.

Degra slammed a fist in disgust. "It's just a false alarm!" he shouted with fatigued irritation. It was just one more computer glitch, in a system that seemed to be filled with glitches; but then again, the technological scope of this weapon was nearly beyond consideration. It was bound to have some software problems along the way.

"Can we resume the test, then?" Depac asked with muted vehemence.

Degra leveled his voice. "Resume the initiation sequence!" The weapon began to thrum again as the energy flowed up and down the power core, building its strength with each iteration. It glowed, it pulsated, and it pounded with life as it built towards controlled overload; within the core resided the power to destroy worlds.

As T'Pol had theorized, the power core was based on a standard matter/anti-matter reaction; but rather than the simple deuterium and anti-deuterium typically used in starships to create warp fields, the weapon was based on a far more refined system of positronium annihilation. Fueled by the injection of raw electrons and their anti-particles, positrons, into the reaction chamber, the particulates swirled at nearly the speed of light, fusing together with such speed and energy that they formed metastable positronium.

Existing for scarce picoseconds in absolute defiance of quantum dynamics, the ungodly particulate eventually shed sufficient energy to allow it cascade down to ground state, where matter/anti-matter annihilation occurred on the quantum level, unleashing hyper-energetic gamma rays that added to the maelstrom within the reactor, building the reaction upon itself as it rapidly accelerated towards climatic apocalypse.

At the core's aperture, the gamma rays were bled off into a narrowing hole. As the waves bounced back and forth within with the ever-tighter tunnel, the collisions picked up speed, increasing the cataclysmic power still further until it was channeled through a magnetic targeting array.

There, the fused energy beam shot out from the weapon, slicing through space and time with a fury unmatched and unrivaled. The sheer power and energy of the beam was enough to overwhelm even the most resistant of electrostatic barriers, and upon encountering a solid object of sufficient mass, could trigger thermonuclear fusion that would utterly consume the targeted object.

The targeted moon imploded, releasing massive shockwaves that swept throughout the fractured system, inundating it with flashes of sub-quantum particulates that were never witnessed outside of the most primal explosions of space-time.

The breaking thrusters of the weapon fired automatically, bringing it to a rolling stop some billion kilometers above the plane of the system. Beneath them, the asteroid field was in chaotic disarray; rocks smashed against each other with abandoned fury, shattering into smaller and smaller pieces, some exploding as unstable cores consumed far too much energy to withstand. It would be millennia before the star system was again safe for transit.

Depac looked on approvingly while Degra cursed. "What is it?" the councilor asked, confused by the scientist's negative reaction.

"We didn't get up to full power," Degra growled. "The weapon was building to an overload. We had to shut it down at—" his finger quickly scanned down the readings. "82% of capacity. I'm going to need time to analyze the data."

"I wouldn't be so concerned," Depac replied reflexively. The largest rocks left were no more than a meter in diameter.

Travis walked into sickbay under his own power before collapsing onto a biobed.

When the power built up within the weapon, and began flowing towards discharge, he had only a shouted command of "_RUN!" _from Commander T'Pol and a couple scarce seconds to pilot the _Enterprise_to safety. Reacting instinctively to the order, he had pulled the starship's nose upward and catapulted it out from the plane of the system at emergency warp some half a second before their sheltered lee was obliterated in the blast wave. When, two hours later, his heart was still racing and his nerves still shaking, he decided to report for medical care.

'Emergency warp' is not a safe procedure, even for the most advanced of starships; as the abused systems raced to respond with nanosecond lapses, relays and conduits exploded across the ship from the unprecedented strain and lack of prep time. Travis could only imagine the nightmare in main engineering; all three shifts had been stirred from their bunks to attend to damage control, and the powerful warp reactor was once again shut down as repair crews fixed the sizable fractures in its lining.

The most punishing aspect of the _Enterprise_'s jump to warp was the microsecond delay in the inertial dampeners. People and equipment were flung against bulkheads and plastered into walls with violent fury, and sickbay was flooded with a stream of injured crewmembers. Broken bones and concussions came in from across the ship; and according to shipboard rumor, Ensign Kee had actually gone _through _a bulkhead down on G-deck.

Travis fell onto the diagnostic bed, heaving for breath as his respiratory system struggled to keep up with the incredible demand being placed on it. A medic hustled over to check on him, and as Travis was being fitted for extra oxygen, he let his head roll to the side.

And found himself staring, eye-to-eye, with Malcolm Reed. The tactical officer was horizontal as well, his right arm and shoulder wrapped with a neuro-immobilizer. "Sorry, sir," Travis choked out, realizing that he was responsible for putting Malcolm in sickbay.

Malcolm gave a glassy, drug-induced smile. "Don't worry about it, Travis," he answered with surprising lucidity. "The Mayweather Maneuver saved the ship. And the mission."

T'Pol stretched the playback out, slowing it further for the eyes of her human captain. The pace seemed to crawl for her, but she knew it was necessary for his comprehension; plus, it allowed her to narrate as they went.

When the playback finished, and the targeted planetoid was battered rubble, T'Pol pulled up sensor telemetry captured in the heat of their escape. "The output was much greater than the probe that attacked Earth," she commented, stating the obvious. The first probe hadn't caused nearly so much destruction; the sheer scale of the wreckage betrayed its greater strength. "However, I don't believe that the device reached its maximum yield."

"That's not good news, T'Pol," Archer replied slowly. "It shattered that planetoid into gravel, and you're telling me that it wasn't even at full power?"

"Precisely, Captain," T'Pol answered. "Although I do not believe that the weapon's power was intentionally reduced for the test. Our sensors detected power fluctuations within its core; it appears that the weapon was building towards an overload."

Archer shook his head in amazement. "Are you saying this was a failure?" It called to mind one of history's worst facts: when dealing with weapons of mass destruction, even a failure could annihilate a city. On several occasions during the Final World War, a thermonuclear devise had failed to ignite fusion…and Pretoria had still been leveled.

"Precisely," T'Pol replied.

"Can you determine why?" Archer asked. He shut off the image of the wrecked star system.

"Not with any degree of certainty." The captain nodded in understanding, so T'Pol continued. "It appears as though the weapon itself functioned correctly. The fuel used to produce the metastable positronium—the kemocite—was not sufficiently enriched, and thus triggered an uncontrolled reaction."

"Gralik!" Archer exclaimed. The arboreal Xindi had done it; months ago, the _Enterprise_had discovered the main kemocite facility supplying the Xindi Union. After lengthy interaction with the captain, the facility's administrator—Gralik—had agreed to sabotage the final shipment. "It looks like he was successful."

"Yes," T'Pol confirmed, "but it is only a matter of time until Degra finds the problem. Once they procure a clean supply of kemocite, the weapon should function at full power."

"T'Pol," Archer replied, "there's an old saying on Earth: never look a gift horse in the mouth."

"I have heard that," T'Pol informed him. "Remarkably logical…for an Earth saying."

With the _Enterprise_once again becalmed in deep space, there was not much need for a linguist on the bridge; any number of technicians could watch the comm boards for open signals. Thus, Hoshi had returned to her lab to continue her work on the insectoid computer core.

"How are things going?" Archer asked as he entered the room. He glanced around carefully. "Did you ride out the Mayweather Maneuver safely?"

"Just fine, Captain." Hoshi pushed her chair back from the table-top desk. "How about you, sir?"

"Oh, just a couple bad bruises." Archer flashed a false smile. "Nothing worse than the usual." While his injuries were not the most severe on the ship, the captain had reported to sickbay as part of the second, 'non-urgent' wave, and received treatment for a deep thigh bruise. If he summoned his focus, he could still walk normally on the leg; _far better than getting the crew concerned, _he reasoned. It was good for them to see their captain healthy and strong.

"So what are you doing down here, sir?" Hoshi asked as she pulled several loose strands of hair back. In recent weeks, she had taken to wearing her long hair in a bun; ease of maintenance was the primary concern these days.

"Oh, I was just walking rounds," Archer replied nonchalantly. He was concerned about the amount of time Hoshi was spending in solitude. "How's the research coming?"

Hoshi sighed and gave a ghost of a smile. "I'm making progress, sir. You should take a look at this." She activated the wall monitor and posted the recognizable sight of starcharts. "I think I've figured out their cartography encodings. The interesting part is this." Over a dozen oblong blue shapes appeared. "These are restricted areas."

Archer stepped forward eagerly; this was a promising development. "Restricted because of anomalies, or because of security concerns?"

"Definitely security concerns," Hoshi answered, her excitement growing. "Classified installations and the like. One of the restricted zones is the proving ground."

"Hoshi," the captain responded with surprising energy. "Is there any way to crack those further? If one of those is a classified military installation—it could be the base for the weapon!"

_I can't remember anything  
Can't tell if this is true or dream  
Deep down inside I feel to scream  
This terrible silence stops me_

Now that the war is through with me  
I'm waking up, I cannot see  
That there is not much left of me  
Nothing is real but pain now

Hold my breath as I wish for death  
Oh please God, wake me

Trip rolled over in the dead of the night. He had lain in bed for hours, but was unable to enter the quiet death of peaceful slumber. His thoughts racing, his adrenaline pounding, the sweet caress of sleep was not forthcoming. And when he finally snatched quick moments of rest, his dreams were haunted by images and memories of events that never happened.

His pillow was plastered with sweat, his eyes sore from the lengthy hours of restless reprieve. The dreams—the nightmares—were brighter this time, flashes and pictures and seething hatred that burned within. The bed sheets were crumpled at the foot of the bunk, the product of his hours of fitful attempts for solace.

_Everything is turning wrong, _he thought to himself, feeling helpless beneath the deluge. _Everything is turning into blasphemy. _The anger that had fueled him for so long, some times above the surface and other times held within his shell, was burning into an enduring of frustration and hopelessness. He couldn't escape the feeling that every day was going to be worse than the one before. Life was slipping away from him, and everything he tried only drove it further towards the abyss.

Furiously, Trip stumbled to his feet and crossed the room to his vanity. His eyes were red, showing the insane strain that he was under. His hair was standing straight up, treated with sweat and grease, spiked in unnatural fashions. _This is not the way I should look, _he told himself. _This is not the way I picture me._

As he looked in the mirror, Trip could feel his left hand trembling, and he slowly raised it before him. If he concentrated on it, focused his willpower…he still couldn't control the shaking. _How the hell did I get here? _he wondered. And the more he wondered, the more the answers squirmed away from him, retreating before his waking mind, back into the deepened recesses of his subconscious; from there, they would continue to abuse him and haunt him, driving daggers through his already-fractured psyche.

_Something about this is wrong. Something about this is wrong, _Trip told himself repeatedly, but it was of no assistance. In the jungle of his life, he could see no path out; and even worse, he reflected, he could see no interest. Hidden within the darkest reservoirs was the true secret of his seething hatred: _I like it. It fuels me. It keeps me going, keeps me alive. _

Trip stared in the mirror at his wrung-out face. The lines in his mind were blurring into nonexistence. _Is this a dream or a memory?_ He was uncertain were one began and the other ended, and no longer cared. All that really mattered was the enduring rage.

_Oh please God, wake me!_

Captain's Log, December 12, 2153. We've returned to the Xindi testing ground. We hope that an analysis of the debris will tell us more about the weapon.

Under usual circumstances, the _Enterprise_'s bridge would be filled with tense anticipation. The ship was charging through scarcely-charted regions of space, close on the tail of the weapon and its designer, the arch-murderer Degra, and the crew was getting a free opportunity to study a proto-planetary system that had failed to develop.

But as Captain Archer looked around him, all he saw were the wearied expressions of a crew pushed to their limits, physically and mentally. The number of drawn faces, blood-shot eyes, tired body postures and split-second lags in reaction time all added up to a crew composed of the walking fatigued, relying more on training than conscious thought. Even T'Pol, with her increased Vulcan stamina, seemed to be dragging; and conspicuously so, Archer realized.

_And then, of course, there's Travis, _Archer noted wryly, looking at the back of his hyper-alert navigator. As Dr. Phlox liked to remind the captain, different people will handle similar situations in different ways; and Travis was definitely the outlier. Between his time at the helm, and his project of charting the Delphic Expanse, the young ensign had been pulling twelve and sixteen hour shifts, day in and day out.

But Mayweather seemed to be thriving on it; he alone of the crew did not seem to need a month's nap. _Well, and Porthos. _The beagle was his usual happy-go-lucky self; Dr. Phlox had taken to doing daily jogs through the corridors with the dog, in an effort to drop a few pounds on each of them. Porthos was happy and tired.

"I'm picking up a ship at the edge of the system," Travis announced attentively, beating Commander T'Pol to the punch. Under the helmsman's careful hands, the _Enterprise_herself was stationed just above the plane of the system, out of the deadly collisions within the unsettled asteroid field; but still close enough to hide in the magnetic field created by the isomagnetic ores within.

Even the captain's reaction was restrained; rather than jumping to his feet, as he was once wont to do, Archer merely leaned forward in his command chair. "Can you identify?"

"It is Xindi," T'Pol answered. "Sensor readings indicate that it is a standard primate shuttle design." For some unknown reason, the primate branch of the Xindi family seemed to prefer the smaller, personal transports; it was just one of many species-specific idiosyncrasies. It had a second characteristic that the _Enterprise_crew could take advantage of: no weapons.

"Have they seen us?" Archer asked.

"I doubt it, sir," Travis replied. "They're not making any movements that would indicate so."

_So far, so good, _Archer told himself. "Why didn't we see them before?"

"We're still encountering difficulties in recognizing the subspace vortices that they use." T'Pol's voice carried an uncharacteristic hint of defensiveness. "A vortex may have deposited them directly on the edge of the system."

"Captain." Malcolm's clipped tones still bore their usual precision as he broke in. "I've been analyzing its hull signature. It matches one of the ships that was here for the test."

This was promising. Archer's mind raced as it pieced the puzzle together; the primate design of the ship was the clincher. There was a good possibility that it was the arch-murderer himself, come back to study the remains, just as the _Enterprise_was doing. T'Pol could undoubtedly provide the odds; but the captain was satisfied with _a damned good possibility._

"Captain, I'm reading four biosigns on board," T'Pol added.

Now, Archer rose to his feet, a plan coming together even as he moved. "Travis," he ordered, "keep us in the magnetic halo, but get us as close as possible. T'Pol, keep an eye on their reaction; we need to keep our presence a secret until the last possible moment. Malcolm—" Archer smiled for the first time that day. "Program an attack run. We're taking that ship."

Strain is not a uniquely human condition. As the great strike inched closer and closer to zero hour, the stress piled upon Degra had intensified; with the Council watching every minuscule action and questioning every little decision, he had to obtain a list of last-minute supplies, complete the construction, and simultaneously test-fire the weapon until every potential hitch was worked out. And in _any _piece of equipment that large and complicated, the number of bugs and scrambling changes were considerable; with a fleet of technicians working under him, Degra was still kept running from one near-meltdown to the next.

In a way, the weapon's failure at the proving ground was a blessing for the scientist. It was easy to justify detaching himself for three days to analyze the debris, and it provided a much-needed break from the chaos back at the production facility. The sensor scans weren't even that difficult; he could leave the majority to his crewmates, and disappear into the rear of the shuttle for his first downtime in months.

"Set a course for the target planetoid," Degra ordered. The bridge of the shuttle was narrow and long; three control consoles filled the main part, lined up one after another like a row of school desks. The first two were manned by the navigator and sensor technician, respectively, while the third was the command station, manned by Degra.

"Stand by to deploy the sensor drones," Degra commanded next. He was not foolish enough to take his ship into that demolition field, but they would edge as close as possible before releasing the probes.

"Sir," Thalen shouted out in alarm, "I'm reading another—" His words were cut off by the violent shuddering of the small ship.

Degra grabbed the edge of his console for stability. "What's that?" he demanded, shouting over the din of his vessel.

"Weapons fire!" Thalen reported. He, too, was gripping his console, scrambling to find purchase as the craft shook beneath his seat. "There's a ship approaching from below!"

"Identify!" Degra barked. His ship was struck again, nearly throwing the scientist from his chair.

"It's the human vessel!" Thalen replied. The voice of the younger primate edged towards panic. "They must have been hiding in the debris!"

The lights flickered and crashed with a loud snap, reducing illumination to that radiating from the computer panels. "Contact the Council!" Degra ordered. "Send out an emergency signal!"

The pilot, Drennan, answered quickly. "The last hit disabled our comm system, sir!" he shouted, equally panicked. In the panacea of the Xindi races, the primates did not customarily handle combat situations; and Degra typically crewed his ship with other scientists.

"Get us out of here!" Degra shouted into the darkness of his vessel.

"They're making a run for it!" Travis announced from the _Enterprise_'s helm. "I think they're going to the vortex!"

"Stay with them, Travis!" Archer ordered. His lethargy had been obliterated by battlefield adrenaline, and the captain stood behind Travis, one foot perched on the leg of the navigation console. "Follow them in if you have to!" Now that the _Enterprise_had declared its presence, he couldn't afford to let the primate ship escape.

"I estimate they have twenty-two seconds to the vortex, Captain," T'Pol added calmly. It was unusual for the bridge to be so quiet during battle; the normal array of sirens, alarms, explosions and shudders were missing, and the Vulcan's voice could carry in the vacuum of noise.

Archer tilted his head sideways. "See what you can do about their engines, Malcolm."

"Aye, sir," Malcolm acknowledged firmly. With their now-common battle efficiency, T'Pol was using her science sensors to scan the enemy vessel for weaknesses; and she now transmitted the necessary data for pinpoint strikes against the primate engines.

Archer cringed as the first two shots went wide; the other ship had jumped into evasive maneuvers at nearly the exact moment, and was now engaged in sudden course changes. In the end, thought, it was still headed in one direction: to the vortex.

Malcolm exercised restraint rather than firing blindly, and moments later, a targeting solution popped up on his console: T'Pol had found a pattern—enough of a pattern—in the movements, and he smiled with pleasure as two more bolts of energy shot out from the phase cannon emitters. They drilled the primate engines with precision, and the smaller craft tumbled over in space.

"They're not going anywhere, sir," Malcolm added in satisfaction.

Archer looked over to Hoshi. "Hail them," he commanded. "Tell them to stand down and prepare to be boarded."

Degra grunted as his ship spun wildly. The gyro-stabilizers had been damaged in the assault, and were fractional seconds slow in firing; it kept him in his chair, but both stomachs churned wildly, displeased with the sensation of intense vertigo.

"Drennan! By the Furies, fire the braking thrusters and bring us to station keeping!" he ordered. His voice was gargled as he tried to suppress the bile; it took several seconds for the spinning to finally stop, and Degra fell back in his chair, feeling dazed as his body struggled to recover its equilibrium.

"Thalen!" Through the confused haze, Degra sought to focus on battle protocols learned and discarded years previously. "Execute command…Degra-six-eight-dash-two!" With his final duty now complete, Degra fell insensate to the deck plating.

"Anything?" Archer asked, taking care to not crowd over T'Pol's shoulder. Vulcans had an unusually strong sense of personal space, but the captain was eager for results.

"No, sir." T'Pol closed her eyes momentarily, as if suppressing a fierce headache. "The last trace I can find was an emergency command that erased the computer core. There's very little data left."

"What about memory buffers?" Archer asked hopefully. "Data echoes?"

"There are some," T'Pol confirmed. "No erasure program is completely effective. However, it will take some time to piece them together. I have found one trace that I believe you'll be interested in." Punching the controls, she brought a file up on the Xindi screen. "These are fragments from a personal file. They are signed by someone named Degra."

"I thought I recognized him," Archer whispered. He hadn't laid eyes on the arch-murderer for months, ever since getting a few fleeting glances back at the kemocite facility; but when they boarded the primate ship, one of the faces had looked familiar. "Does it mention anything about the weapon?"

"No, Captain," T'Pol replied. "There is a reference to a system that he visited recently, called Azati." It was something; they could compare it to the list of protected systems that Hoshi had compiled.

"How about you, Trip?" Archer asked, turning his focus to the chief engineer.

Charles Tucker was hunched over, half inside a bulkhead. "I'd love to spend an afternoon taking this engine apart," Trip replied. Rather than curiosity, his tone seemed to be full of irritation; it was unsurprising, Archer knew. The engineer had carried the torch of pain and revenge far more fervently than the others, his anger not lessening with time. Now that they held the arch-murderer himself in the _Enterprise_brig, Trip would undoubtedly prefer to be there, carrying out the interrogation himself.

"Not your typical engine configuration?" Archer stated the obvious, hoping to reorient his friend's attention to the machinery in front of them.

Trip pulled his head out of the bulkhead. "I can't even tell how the blasted thing works," he grumbled. "Everything's tied in through their main deflector—according to what I know, these engines shouldn't even function."

"Is it more advanced technology?" Archer asked skeptically.

Trip shook his head. "Naw. It's more…different, but laterally. It'll take me a while to go through it, sir," he said. Exhaustion was evident in his face.

Archer was concerned; but he had known the engineer for years, and recognized that Trip was not ready to face his demons. Pressure would not help; _sometimes, _Archer reflected, _all you can do is keep an eye out._ Sooner or later Tucker was going to break down, and Archer promised himself that he would catch it.

"Learn everything you can," he ordered.

As commanded, Major Hayes and three other MACOs stood guard in the antechamber of the _Enterprise_'s brig. The Xindi-primates were sealed, two-by-two, inside the cells; and while it would take a miraculous feat for them to escape, the captain was taking no chances. Plus, he hoped that the presence of the armed commandos might intimidate the scientists into better cooperating.

Archer arrived at the backside of F-deck just as Phlox was leaving, and the two held a whispered consultation in the corridor. The upside was that the prisoners had recovered; the downside was that they weren't speaking.

Trying to project a wave of anger before him, Archer approached the transparent aluminum barriers and hit the intercom. "I want to know where you're building the weapon!" he snarled furiously.

"I don't know what you're talking about!" Degra shot back strongly. For an opening volley, it was insignificant; no more and no less than expected.

"The hell you don't!" Archer barked. "We've already identified you, _Degra!_ You're designing another weapon—we saw you here with it just a few days ago!"

"By capturing us, you've accomplished nothing!" Degra's voice had an unexpected degree of bitterness.

"Where's the weapon, Degra?" Archer demanded furiously.

The session was interrupted by the temporary flickering of lights, causing Archer to step back and hit the intercom. "Archer to the bridge. Report!"

Malcolm rubbed his temples to ease the strain before responding. They had been chasing stray systems failures across the ship for the better part of three hours now; and they were steadily growing worse, despite the best efforts of the diagnostics staff. To compound problems, T'Pol and Trip were on the primate shuttle, trying to strip it of its secrets.

Malcolm didn't know which part was worse—that their two most senior technicians were absent, or that their absence meant he was in command of the bridge. "Reed here, sir," he answered momentarily. He couldn't hide his fatigue, but hoped it would disappear in the comm channel. "There's a surge in the plasma network. We're taking care of it."

"What's causing it?" Archer's voice sounded faint; _just one more problem to track down, _Malcolm thought wearily. He was a dedicated tactical officer; if it didn't involve the weapons systems, his engineering skills were meager.

Travis slid in smoothly. "It's our proximity to the debris field, Captain. It's starting to overwhelm our systems."

"Sir, I recommend increasing our distance by a factor of two or three," Malcolm added. He looked askance at the navigator, who had stepped into the gap so fluently.

"All right," Archer responded. "Take the ship further out, but no farther than necessary—I want to stay within the halo."

"Understood," Malcolm replied, and the connection was severed. Taking the ship out was a calculated proposition; the isomagnetic halo was hiding their presence, but its disruptive effects were wrecking havoc on their systems.

For the first time, Malcolm started wondering if they were on a quixotic crusade.

"Doctor, I could use some good news." Upon entering sickbay, the captain crossed immediately to the central diagnostic bed, and hoisted himself up on it.

Phlox hustled over. "And what's the problem?"

"With me or the ship?" Archer asked wryly, leaving unsaid the third possibility: _or the mission?_

"Let's start with you, Captain," Phlox answered with a friendly smile. "I am your physician, after all."

"How would you classify, _so tired that my bones are aching?_" Archer's own return smile was faint.

"Ah," Phlox said carefully, grabbing his handheld mediscanner. "I can give you some vitamin shots to help with the fatigue, but you need some downtime to rest." His usually-jolly expression grew concerned as he read the scan results. "Any other symptoms…Jonathan?" he asked carefully, impressing upon the captain the need for honesty.

"Pain in my abdomen," Archer answered. He rubbed his stomach gently to indicate the location. "It's usually just a dull pain, but sometimes it flares up. It feels like something's stabbing my stomach."

"Any unusual lightheadedness, spells of dizziness, difficulty waking up?" Phlox asked, running down the diagnostic chart in his mind.

"Occasionally," Archer allowed, feeling a little sheepish. Apparently, he should have come to the doctor sooner.

"You have ulcers, Jonathan," Phlox replied gently. "Brought on by stress and lack of proper physical care, no doubt. I can give you some medicine to help, but you _have to take better care of yourself._"

Archer nodded in understanding. "It's just…things are getting a little frustrating right now," he answered. "The interrogation of Degra is going nowhere. I can't help but wonder if it's time to get more forceful with him."

"Well, you know my answer to that, Jonathan," Phlox answered. He disappeared into his office for a moment before returning. "It's the strangest thing," he said. "My pharmacological synthesizer seems to have lost three kilos of raw material in the last few months."

Archer grimaced, trying to ignore that particular memory. "Is there anything you can do to help with Degra, Doctor?"

Phlox shrugged. "I could make a truth serum, but it would take weeks to synthesize the correct formula."

"We don't have weeks," Archer replied. "Anything else?"

"Well…" Phlox paused. "I'm not sure if it will help, but it may be possible to erase his most recent memory engrams. I've been studying Xindi neuro-physiology. I'll need to perform a few tests, but I expect it should work."

"At the least, Degra would forget that he came aboard, or that he met any of us." Archer pursed his brow. "How selective could this memory wipe be?"

"I've built flight simulators for Starfleet training," Trip mused as he weighed the engineering challenge in his mind. "I'll have to check our stores to make sure we have the right equipment, but we should be able to toss together the mockup in a day or so."

"It's not simply a matte of constructing a shuttle, although," Malcolm countered. His precise diction cut through the briefing alcove. "It has to be _designed. _We don't want a standard Starfleet shuttle, after all. If we're going to sell the illusion, we have to make sure every detail is consistent."

"We have to create an alien race," Hoshi added. It was her specialty, but she was uncertain about their ability to pull it off. "We have to decide _who _built it, what language they use, what technology they have…everything down to layout of the control interface has to fit."

"I think we can handle the technological end of this, sir," Trip stated confidently. "It's the… 'psychological' side that's going to take some work."

"If Degra's going to buy into this, he'll want to know everything that's happened in the missing three years," Malcolm elucidated. "No offense, sir, but you can't make the story up on the spot. It needs to be prepared, thought-out, tested for inconsistencies and flaws."

"That sounds like a project for our resident Vulcan," Archer responded. "Are you up for it, T'Pol?"

"Constructing a solid story is a complex task," T'Pol replied carefully. "The premise is that you and Degra spent the three missing years in confinement with each other, prior to your fortuitous escape. Presumably, Degra would have shared details about his personal life. We have little such data on him."

"We have some," Hoshi mentioned. "We've been able to reconstruct several letters that Degra wrote to his wife."

"We can construct a story that is consistent within itself," T'Pol demurred. "But we cannot account for unknown facts."

"Do the best you can," Archer decided. "It's a risk that we'll just have to take."

"Are you sure we have the medical part of this down?" Trip asked skeptically.

"Don't worry about that, Commander," Phlox said reassuringly. "I already have Degra prepped for the procedure. Not only will it blank his memory of the last few days, but it will also create the sensation of 'missing time.'"

"It may be necessary to communicate with you while you're inside the simulator," T'Pol added.

"The MACOs have subdermal transceivers," Malcolm observed.

Phlox nodded. "They're relatively easy to implant."

Archer scanned his command crew, looking for signs of unease; he saw weariness and lassitude, but little doubt. "All right, then," he decided. "Let's do it. I think you all know your jobs."

As the staff filed out, Trip stayed behind, waiting until the two men were left alone.

"Captain," Trip began slowly.

"Spit it out," Archer replied.

"With all due respect, sir, this is a complex task with a lot of things that could go wrong." The words rushed from Trip's mouth. "It would be far easier to just beat the information of him."

"We don't engage in torture, Trip." Archer's answer lacked zeal.

"Sir…if there's _anyone_, and _anytime, _then it's Degra, right now! I mean, he's the designer of the blasted weapon! He's the arch-murderer who's already killed _seven million _humans! And he has the information that we need to stop the second attack! We don't know how much time we have, Captain—we can't afford to waste more time playing games with that bastard!"

Archer's gaze grew steely. "Don't let your emotions interfere with your duty, Commander."

"Oh, so now you're a bloody Vulcan?" Trip exploded angrily. "Maybe our emotions are right, Captain! Maybe it's time to show the Xindi that we'll fight back!"

Archer raised an eyebrow. "Problems between you and T'Pol, Trip?" he asked gently.

Trip glared back.

"You have your orders, Commander." Archer's voice hardened. "You're dismissed."

In the dead of ship's night, one could still find many of the primary staff on duty—T'Pol and Archer were holed up in the captain's ready room, running through trial runs of the cover tale; Trip and Malcolm were in the launch bay with a team of engineers, piecing together the simulator; and Phlox, as usual, was awake and active in sickbay, tending to his charges.

It was relatively simple for Travis to find Hoshi; even a NX-class starship was only so large, and Ensign Sato was increasingly becoming a person of habit.

"Evening, Hoshi," Travis offered with a friendly smile as he entered her lab. Hoshi had adopted the same look as many of the crewmembers burning the oil that late night. Her bulky duty coveralls lay on the floor, and she was clad in a tank top and standard-issue flannel pajama pants.

_The look fits all of us, _Travis mused. Countless hours on duty had segued into the stillness of the early morning hours, and earlier he had overheard T'Pol request short breaks for the crew—enough time to bathe, she said. Fortunately, Porthos' equally-sensitive nose wasn't offended by the distinct odor of overworked and worn out bodies.

Hoshi offered a faint smile in response. "Hi, Travis," she said, covering a yawn at the end. "What can I—oh, the navigation report. I must've dozed off for a bit."

"I think we all have," Travis answered. "At least you have lights on in here; I'm doing the navigational maps in the dark." _And the starlight, but that doesn't exactly induce wakefulness._

Hoshi fumbled with the padds on the table before selecting one. "Here you go. I got through another sector of ghost data." She yawned again and smiled sheepishly. "It looks like Azati _is _one of the restricted systems, but I can't figure out why it's restricted."

"Hey, it's still good news," Travis replied excitedly as he took the padd. He turned to leave, but from the corner of his eye, he noticed Hoshi's face grow slack as her gaze drifted back to a particular data padd. "What is it?" he asked in concern.

Hoshi shook her head, trying to snap off the fugue. "It's nothing. It's…" she hesitated momentarily. "We've been able to recover a number of letters that Degra wrote to his wife. Some of them are quite personal."

Travis didn't quite understand; the information would be highly useful for the captain's deception. "So why the melancholy?"

"A few months ago, his wife lost a pregnancy," Hoshi answered quietly. "It would have been their third child. They even had a name picked out—Trenia."

"I see," Travis replied softly. "I actually kind of like that name."

"And now we get to destroy her father," Hoshi finished.

"Are we ready to go, Doc?" Archer asked as he entered sickbay with an unusual spring in his step. It was the morning of their great experiment, and the captain was feeling energized by the promise the day held.

Phlox was bent over the still figure of Degra, inspecting his handiwork for any anomalous indicators. The left side of the primate's face was now covered with an intricate, blue-stained tattoo. "Ah, Captain!" Phlox said, straightening up. "We should be ready whenever you are!"

"Nice work," Archer noted, checking the etching for himself. The array of geometric patterns could have belonged to any number of races.

"Thank you," Phlox replied. "Dermal art used to be very common on Denobula. Part of being a good Denobulan doctor is knowing how to _remove _it," he added in good spirit. "I also stimulated his hair follicles."

"I'm not sure about the gray," Archer replied skeptically. The rangy, backswept mane was now nearly as long as the captain's forearm, its black coloring peppered with silver and gray. "This is only supposed to be three years from now."

"Ah, but you have to account for the stress of imprisonment and torture," Phlox answered. "Unusual stress often causes hair pigmentation to change unnaturally fast. Why, I bet you have a few gray hairs yourself!"

"Let's not go there, _Doctor._"

Phlox chuckled boisterously. "I won't tell, Captain. I also have the bloodworms ready for you." He handed the captain a jar of writhing, string-like serpents.

Archer took it slowly. "You're sure these are safe?"

"Oh, completely," Phlox replied reassuringly. "I've treated patients with Regulan bloodworms for years. You should have no side-effects aside from a thoroughly cleansed lymphatic system—which might do you some good."

Archer shook his head. "They sure look nasty enough."

Phlox took the jar back carefully. "Please try not to injure them, Captain. They're difficult to replace."

"I'll do my best," Archer answered. "Now where do you need me?"

"Up on the bed." Phlox gestured to a particular unit. "A little follicle growth, some artificial bruising and scars, and you'll look the part." The doctor pointedly wrinkled his nose. "I see you've already been working on the smell."

Archer glared at the doctor. "Just one more thing, Phlox," he said in mock warning. "My hair _stays _this color. Archers don't go gray."

"I'll just make you bald then," Phlox replied.

As midday approached, the plan neared fruition. The simulator was built, tested, torn down and rebuilt. An alien language and sensibilities were programmed into the design; the words bore a remarkable similarity Bantu dialect from Earth, but there was no chance of Degra recognizing it. Archer and T'Pol had ran through the cover story so many times that the captain was starting to believe it himself; the doctor's physiological alterations had set in, and the bloodworms were wriggling frenetically underneath the skin of his two patients.

Still unconscious, Degra was carried to the launch bay and placed into the simulator. It was time to begin.

_Back in the womb it's much too real  
In pumps life that I must feel  
But can't look forward to reveal  
Look to the time when I'll live_

Fed through the tube that sticks in me  
Just like a wartime novelty  
Tied to machines that make me be  
Cut this life off from me

Hold my breath as I wish for death  
Oh please God, wake me

The racket and shaking woke Degra from his slumber. Sirens screamed mercilessly, and the floor danced beneath his body; puffs of smoke drifted in the air, cast off by the crackle of broken circuits and sparking conduits.

Dazed and confused, Degra struggled to his feet, grabbing the back of a chair for stability. His mind was foggy and slow; he felt like he had been snatched out from the depths of a deep sleep, and everything about him was groggy. In the haze of his mind, he had to focus, narrowing his thoughts with laser precision, just to summon the most basic pieces of coherent information. _I'm Degra. My name is Degra._ He repeated the mantra several times, seizing on it for support amidst the surrounding cacophonous ruckus.

_I am Degra, but where am I?_ He shook his head, trying to clear his cloudy vision, and a strange rattling sound rewarded him. In the fog, within and without, he couldn't recognize his surroundings nor recall where he was supposed to be. His last memories…he could not remember. A thick cloud blotted out much of his mind, leaving him reeling in a state of waking forgetfulness.

_Where am I?_ Degra clutched the backrest tightly as the room about him shuddered vehemently, doing its best to knock him from his shaky feet. He shook his head again, and blinked his eyes, trying to clear the haze from his vision; there was little he could do about the haze in the air.

It looked like…_a shuttle of some type_. _Yes, _he decided, _I must be inside a shuttle. _The contours were almost unmistakable, hidden as they were behind the clouds of smoke; he was in the rear cabin of a personal-sized shuttlecraft. It was unadorned; the walls were straight bulkheads, some streaked with vicious amounts of carbon scoring. Elsewhere, he could see where the sheet metal had once been a vibrant tan color, but age and abuse had taken a toll.

_That…doesn't answer much, _Degra realized as he tried to clear the blockage in his mind. _What shuttle? Why? Where?_ The questions leapt into his head simultaneously, confounding his abused neuro-pathways still further. He had no memory of getting on this shuttle; he had no recent memories at all, nothing to account for this uncertain change of circumstances.

The shuttle shook again, nearly sweeping the Xindi-primate from his feet. As his grip instinctively tightened, his body finally triggered a belated surge of adrenaline, spiking his system with a sense of presence and awareness. _I can figure out where I am later, _he realized. _This craft is under attack. And I'm on it_. He was not accustomed to being under the gun.

In the shuttle's cockpit he could see the back of a head. Hairy, unwashed, heavily matted, it meant little to him; it could be anyone from his vantage point, from a savior to an abductor to an arch-villain bent on destroying him. "Who are you?" Degra demanded. His voice cracked from the rawness in his throat; he could tell that he had not spoken in several days, and a choking breath sucked in smoke, causing him to cough violently.

"We'll talk later!" The pilot whipped his head back momentarily, long enough for Degra to catch a glimpse. The primate was crestfallen; he did not recognize the species. It gave him no clues as to his fate. "They're targeting our engines!" the pilot shouted, turning back to his controls.

"What do you want from me?" Degra demanded, unwilling to budge from his position of temporary stability. His arms stayed wrapped around the backrest, clinging to it as though it fueled his life, even as his feet scrambled for purchase on the quaking floor. A clump of airborne particulates clogged his throat, forcing Degra to hack violently and spit out the offending mixture.

"You're the engineer!" the alien shouted, sending the words drifting backwards as they warred with the tortured screams of the shuttle. His mangy hair flew back and forth. "See if you can get those shields back online!"

Reacting without thought, Degra finally released his life-giving hold and staggered towards the offered console. He bent low, trying to stay on his feet even as the deck plates heaved in one direction, then another; the engineer in him, beginning to wake up, recognized that the gyrostabilizers were out. With relief, he reached the console, and grabbed it by either side to support himself.

He stared at the alien symbols with uncharacteristic confusion. Perhaps if his mind was fully active, he might be able to sort it out; engineering was a common language, even across species and civilizations. But now…Degra closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to puncture the shroud that blotted out his mind.

"Out of my way!" the alien barked, shoving Degra even as he spoke. As Degra stumbled away, the alien took the controls, tapping the commands frantically as he wrestled with the shuttle's unwilling shields. A curse slipped out, then another, as the alien pushed his raggedy hair back from his face.

With no apparent position in the battle, Degra picked his way across the cabin to a viewing port. The first sight was unsurprising, and reassuring in a way: the chilled darkness of deep space, populated with thousands of pinpricks of light. He was in space, safe among the bosom of the stars.

Then two ships arced into his view, spitting out powerful bolts of light at the shuttle. The small craft shook under the weight of the collision, and Degra's hands fumbled on their own for a safe grip. His mind was elsewhere.

The ships belonged to Xindi-insectoids.

It was confusing, to say the least. One part of Degra ran cold at the sight; to be on the receiving end of an insectoid attack, in such an unprotected shuttle, meant certain death. But the fear was outweighed by the confusion; the alarms, the sirens, the screeches, the lights flashing, the smoke, the sparks and fires, all assaulted his mind, preventing any clarity of thought from emerging.

"I think I found forcefield emitters!" the alien shouted excitedly, and moments later, the intense shaking slowed to a more manageable level. The thrashing beats in Degra's head slowed, allowing his reeling mind a chance to recover its grasp on reality. "We have to get out of here!" the alien called out. "They're not going to last for long!"

His thoughts clearing, Degra saw an easy route forward. "Open a channel to those ships!" he ordered, falling into the co-pilot's chair.

The alien looked at him with disbelief. "_What?"_

"They're Xindi!" Degra exclaimed. "They must not know that I'm here! If you open a channel, I'll order them to hold their fire!" It was so simple, really.

The alien stared back with incomprehension. "What are you talking about? It's been a long time since _any _Xindi took orders from you!"

It did not compute. Something was not adding up correctly, but Degra's famished brain could not identify the missing piece. _The Xindi don't take orders from me? _The thought was arrogant at first, before segueing into confusion, then fear. _If the Xindi don't take orders from me—we're as good as dead!_

The alien scrambled with his controls. "We're carrying five hundred liters of warp plasma in the spare tanks!" The significance was lost on Degra—his mind could not move fast enough, the neurons would not fire quickly enough, to adapt. _Why are the insectoids firing on me?_

The shuttle quaked under the force of a powerful hit, the rear of the cabin quickly filling with the green tendrils of plasma fires. It shocked Degra's mind forward; not far, but just far enough to act. "I'll find the vent controls!" he called out, recognizing the actuators as he saw them. "On your mark!"

"Now!"

Degra opened the vents, instantly releasing five hundred liters of hyper-energized warp plasma directly into the path of their attackers. The plan held; moments later, the insectoid vessels crawled to a halt. "Did we disable them?" Degra asked, watching the tactical schematic closely. The insectoid ships were not renewing their pursuit.

"Yep." The alien slumped back in relief. "The plasma got into their intake manifolds. Their engines are overheating."

Degra's sense of relief was short. _At least we didn't destroy them, _he thought, _but I still helped attack a Xindi warship_. As the din cleared, he turned to regard his companion suspiciously. "I want to know who you are," Degra demanded. "And why you've abducted me."

"You really don't remember," the alien said slowly, as if undergoing a dawning realization. "You don't remember me at all? You don't remember the time we've spent together?" The alien let his chin fall to his chest. "I was afraid this might happen," he said softly.

"Who-are-you?" Degra asked again, through gritted teeth.

"My name is Archer." The alien pointed to himself. "It's me, Archer!"

_The name—_something about it was familiar. Something about it screamed danger, but try as he might, Degra could not summon it from the recesses of his mind. He _knew _this alien. _But from where? Why? And is he a friend?_

The sense of discomfort increased. Degra's instincts were screaming now, and he forced his brain to think. He had come across the name recently, recognized it from—

Degra stumbled backwards in shock. "What species are you?"

The alien smiled. "You've been through a lot in the last two days," he said. "Just let me figure out—"

"WHAT SPECIES!" Degra bellowed.

The alien nodded. "I'm human," he replied simply.

Degra staggered backwards in the cabin, seeking to place as much distance as possible between himself and this devil. "You're from the Earth vessel," he said, finally placing the name. "You—" he pointed a quaking finger. "You are one of Them! You are one of the Destroyers! May the Furies save me!"

"Degra, you have to listen to me." The One called Archer reached out a friendly hand. "I'm not your enemy anymore. You've spent the last two days in an _interrogation chamber_, Degra. Their interrogation methods can affect your memory."

Degra felt his back hit the wall. There was no room left to retreat, no room to flee, no way to escape from this nightmare. He began whispering under his breath, recalling the lessons he had been taught as a child. "Even the progenitors were deceived by the serpent's cunning, so too will the One come after you." His eyes were slammed shut as he willed himself to wake up. "But the poison of vipers will be on His lips."

"Degra!" The One called Archer said more forcefully this time. "The two of us just escaped from an insectoid prison colony. We've shared a cell there for almost three years!"

"_That's not possible!" _Degra hissed. He opened his eyes, but the One was still there; all of Degra's willpower could not dispel the illusion, nor wake him from the dream. _Is this real?_ His thoughts ran, panicked, through his mind, jumping from point to point as fear threatened to overwhelm him.

"Roll up your sleeves," Archer said as he rolled up his own. Uncertain, Degra pushed his up, cuffing it around his elbow.

They had matching tattoos on their forearms. Degra recognized the pattern, even as he struggled to believe his eyes; it was a common prison insignia, used by inmates to establish camaraderie. It was unbelievable…yet there it was.

"The conflict between one people is over," the One called Archer continued. "It was finished three years ago, Degra. We both lost."

_Is this some devious human trick?_ There was no way the humans could have known the tattooed insignia; Degra himself only recognized it because his work had required him to interact with a handful of imprisoned scientists and engineers. The patterns were distinctive; from it, he could even identify the exact prison and cell block. According to his, he had been held at Azeyar—reserved for enemies of the Xindi Diaspora.

_There is no way the humans could know it, _Degra decided. In a way, it was a relief; it meant that this was only a dream. The Furies _hadn't _abandoned him to the Destroyers.

"I promise I'll explain everything," the One called Archer continued. "But first, we have to get out of here before our friends out there repair their engines."

Degra nodded in nonchalant acceptance. If this was a dream, his best bet might be to simply play along until he woke up. "Where will you take us?"

"There's a system about a week from here," the alien mirage answered. "It's isolated. I doubt they'll look for us there."

As the shuttle rattled into warp, Degra looked out a porthole. His reflection stared back at him; dirty, worn, his hair long and ragged…if he didn't know that he was dreaming, he might have actually believed the human's story.

The One called Archer spun around in the pilot's chair to face his guest. Evidently, Degra surmised, they were out of danger; the insectoids—his own people, if only partially—had been left behind, their stolen craft outpacing the Xindi warships that once pursued them. _If this is real, _Degra knew, _the insectoids will be back_. His Xindi kin did not take well to having their prey escape.

Degra eyed the alien with suspicion. There were many questions on his mind, facts to ascertain and theories to challenge and revise. "You expect me to believe that my own people would hold me prisoner?" he asked, daring the alien to craft a believable answer.

Archer's smile was slanted. "It's been awhile since you referred to those overgrown grasshoppers as your own people. Three years, in fact."

As the hours had worn on, and the shuttlecraft failed to disappear into a waking mist, Degra's initial conclusions began to change. _What if this isn't a dream? _Dreams end, usually quickly. Perhaps if he was in a coma…then again, it was far too _real_, far too tangible, to write off as a dream. He could smell the electronic stench in the air; he could smell the odor of his own body, and that of the human's.

"Why don't I remember you? Why don't I remember _anything _from the last three years?" Degra could tell that he was missing memories; something _had _happened that he had forgotten…or was being blocked. But three years' worth? _Could it really be that long?_

"It's because of the bloodworms," Archer answered confidently.

"Bloodworms?" Degra had never heard of such a thing.

"They're a new method for interrogations," Archer explained. "The insectoids picked it up from another species a couple years ago. They insert the worms into your blood vessels—" Archer pointed to his own veins. "The blood carries their secretions to the brain, where they work on your brain chemistry to make prisoners more cooperative. Don't ask me how exactly that happens—I just know that it does."

It was…plausible. False cover stories usually made the mistake of being _too _informative—ironically, Archer's admission of not knowing tempted Degra to believe the human. "But what does that have to do with my memory?"

"It's a side effect." Archer spread his hands in a casual gesture. "The brain is a sensitive organ. The same thing happened when they questioned me—I forgot everything that happened since flight school. Don't worry about it, Degra. It'll start coming back in a few days."

"And you say that I've been held prisoner for three years." There was definitely a gap in his memory, but _three years' worth?_ And for anything prior, his recollection was crystal clear.

"Three years," Archer confirmed.

"If that's true, why would they question me now?"

"How would I know?" Archer shrugged. "They've interrogated you on and off for all three years. They must think you have more information about the weapon."

_That explains the memory discrepancy,_ Degra realized. The repetition over the last three years could reasonably be responsible for the complete wipe—while leaving everything prior completely intact.

And the One called Archer wasn't fading anyway, despite the questioning. It was becoming more and more likely that…that _this_ entire situation was somehow real, and not simply a dream state. It was too real and too downright consistent to be a bad hallucination.

Which meant that somehow, he had become trapped in a shuttle with the _leader _of the Destroyers, and was actually listening to the lies the One wove. Degra pushed to the jackpot question. "How did I end up in prison?"

"This is going to take some time." Archer let out a sigh as he reclined. "What's the last thing you remember?"

That was easy—Degra remembered it like it was yesterday. "I was on my vessel," he answered. "We were approaching the Calindra system."

Archer nodded. "The testing ground. Your prototype had failed."

"We figured out that the kemocite had been sabotaged," Degra replied slowly. "One of the reptilian ships had already departed for the production facility. The administrator and four of his aides were to be executed."

A quick look of surprise and pain flickered across the human's face. "That's the first time you've told me that," Archer said quietly.

It was surprising to Degra—not that Archer didn't know; the Xindi scientist could believe that he had never disclosed such sensitive information to one of the Destroyers. But he hadn't expected the human to show pain upon hearing the news. "So how did that trigger _my _arrest?"

"The insectoids never completely believed your innocence," Archer replied. "They couldn't understand how someone of your skills could have missed the dirty kemocite. You stayed on the project for awhile longer, but they never completely trusted you."

_It fits, _Degra thought. The insectoids were deeply paranoid. Over the years, several of his colleagues had come under insectoid suspicion. Once there, it was nearly impossible to get out; his Xindi kin did not extend trust easily, and never twice. "What happened to the weapon?"

"The test failure didn't make much of a difference," Archer answered. "It only slowed down the program. A few weeks later the weapon was launched. It destroyed my planet. By that time, the insectoids already had you under constant surveillance."

It seemed ludicrous at first—Degra was a chosen favorite of the Xindi Council itself, under the protection of both the primate and arboreal councilors. The insectoids wouldn't _dare _move against him. _No, they would, _he realized morosely. They were often a rogue element within the Council; and it was tolerated in the interests of Xindi unity.

"Were we successful?" Degra asked.

Archer shrugged nonchalantly. "I don't know if you'd call it a success. Earth _was _destroyed. My people are nearly wiped out—we'll be gone within a generation. But in the aftermath, the old Xindi rivalries surfaced. The insectoids arrested you straight from the victory party."

_Yes, _Degra realized. With the final victory over the Destroyers, the insectoids would have naturally turned their paranoia inwards, feeling the need to purge the Xindi Union of potential betrayers. And anyone not exactly like them was a potential traitor.

"The insectoids started attacking other colonies," the human continued. "They killed thousands of your people."

"The reptilians and aquatics would never allow that," Degra responded. The arboreals were not warlike; they would have been irrelevant, even in the face of an insectoid coup.

"From what I've gathered, there wasn't a lot they could do," Archer answered. "They've bragged quite a bit about it. While the other Xindi were busy constructing the weapon, the insectoids held back resources and supplies to build a new fleet."

_They did_. It hit Degra with stunning force. The other four Xindi races had all contributed willingly to the weapon; but the insectoids had always found excuses. The primate councilor, Depac, believed that the insectoids were working on a secret program, but thought little of it; _everything _the insectoids did, they did in secret.

"They used Earth as a diversion," Archer added. "It was a bogeyman, to draw attention and resources away from the Xindi core. Their goal all along was to move against the other Xindi races."

Degra didn't want to believe it. He _couldn't _believe it. Did this—this _human _mean that Earth was never a threat? But Degra had learned of the human Destroyers with his own senses. It wasn't ghost images or manufactured data; the threat had been _real_.

Of course, that didn't negate the possibility that the insectoids were playing a double game. And of course the human captain would proclaim the innocence of his own world. And so would a serpent…Degra's head spun, but as he lifted his arms, he saw something _wriggling _under the surface of his skin.

"Are you all right?" Archer asked as Degra yelled in alarm. The Xindi flung his arms away as if he could get away from them. "Don't worry, it's just a bloodworm," Archer said. "It'll work its way out."

"Can you remove it?" Degra asked hopefully. The sight of it was curling his stomach.

"Hang on," Archer replied. He rummaged through a couple of lockers before pulling out a knife and a glass vial. "Hold still."

Degra cringed as the Destroyer brought the deadly weapon down, slicing into the Xindi's skin, but he refused to yank his arm away. The knife sliced through his vein with swift precision and a spurt of blood. The head of a worm wriggled its way towards the opening; and Archer pinched it between two fingers, sliding out the entire six-inch length before depositing the creature in the vial.

Degra wished he could thank the human—but he was far from convinced. _I know this is real, _he mused; _it's not a dream or a state of fugue. But is this human REAL and truthful, or his he pumping me full of lies? Is he using me as the tool to bring about the end of my people?_

This time, Degra joined the human in the cockpit. He was clearly not in any present physical danger; Archer had the opportunity, but had not acted on it. "I don't understand how a Xindi and a human could put aside their differences so quickly."

"Trust me, it wasn't quick," Archer replied. He pointed to a scar over his left brow. "You gave me this on the first night we spent locked up together."

"And why _were _we locked up together?"

"Why else?" Archer smiled again. "The guards thought it would be fun. They figured one of us would beat the other to death. Nearly happened, too," he added sadly. "Here you were, the arch-murderer—" Degra flinched at the term. "Who had killed everyone I ever cared about. I was going to make sure you never walked out of that cell, but I was in pretty shape."

"How did it turn out?" Degra asked warily. It was discomforting to be referred to as a murderer. He had never really thought of himself as such, and it was even more discomforting to realize that the term might just fit.

"The guards placed wagers on who would survive the longest," Archer continued. "You should be pleased—you were the odds-on favorite. For weeks we tried to kill each other…I was lying in my bunk one day, unable to move, when I finally asked myself what the point was."

"What do you mean?" Degra asked.

"What was the point in killing each other over people who were already dead anyway?" Archer replied. "So I made a proposal, and you agreed. The two of us would work together to get out of that place. And here we are." He gestured expansively to the cramped shuttle.

For the first time, Degra took a close look at the craft. "I don't recognize it."

"It's a Malosian cargo shuttle," Archer explained. "The insectoids started dealing with the Malosians about a year ago. We discovered that there were usually a couple of these lying around the prison. No weapons, but she's sturdy."

For Degra, it was the worst sort of information—something that he couldn't verify. He had never heard of the Malosians; the explanation was weak, but plausible. It wasn't like the insectoids to strike up relations that quickly, nor allow alien technology into a restricted zone; but it _was _possible. And how had they escaped at all? It was difficult, but not impossible, to flee from Azeyar. _If this human is telling the truth about an outbreak of Xindi civil war, _Degra realized, _we most likely had some assistance._

"Perhaps we should set a course to your vessel," Degra suggested. He wasn't really serious about it; he was curious to see how the human would respond. "Is it still in the Delphic Expanse?"

"Do you really think the insectoids would be that sloppy?" Archer shook his head. "They caught up with us outside of Azati. They overwhelmed us, boarded the ship, and took me prisoner. I think they planted spatial charges around our warp reactor—they made me watch the _Enterprise_implode."

"And your crew?"

"I never saw them. I think they were left on the ship." Sorrow was written across the captain's face.

Degra couldn't help but feel pain for the human captain. Losing a ship—losing a _crew_—was difficult, even if it was the enemy. Degra wasn't a particularly bloodthirsty person, after all; he only participated in designing the weapon because he had been convinced that the humans were to be the Destroyers. He didn't _want _to kill them, nor did he _wish _death on these aliens; and seeing the tender side of this one brought into sharp relief the meaning of seven million deaths. _And the following slaughter. My the Furies forgive me, for I did only what I had to._

Degra shook his head slowly. "I never thought the insectoids were capable of this. They've always been a belligerent species…extremely paranoid and distrusting. But to make such a move on their own?" Unfortunately, a part of him could believe it. "Captain," he said, deciding to take a chance, "do you know what happened to my family? They made so many sacrifices when I was called up to design the weapon." He bit his lip. "I owe them everything."

"You warned them before you were arrested," Archer replied. "You told me you'd heard from Naara. She and the children had fled to safety. We have a ship now, Degra, and I have nowhere to go; if you want, we can go look for them."

"We did have a safe retreat picked out," Degra said slowly. Xindi strife was a constant threat; many high-ranking officials had escape plans ready, in case the Council disintegrated.

"Do you remember the coordinates?" Archer asked hopefully.

"I doubt there's anything left," Degra replied. "It would have been one of the first colonies to be attacked. Naara and the children were supposed to catch a transport away. I suppose I have no way of knowing if they did," he added morosely.

"There may have been survivors," Archer suggested. "We can at least check!"

"It's too dangerous." Degra slumped back. "It was near a—classified installation. I'm sure the insectoids will still have patrol ships in the area. We should find—"

A subtle _bang _resounded in the cabin, followed by the telltale hiss of gas. The two men, both space veterans, moved instinctively to track the source. "It's reactor coolant," Archer called out, even as he began to choke on the thickening green smoke. "The conduit must have fractured in the attack." He tossed an oxygen mask to Degra. "Take it!"

"What about you?" Degra grew woozy as he spoke. He knew he had little time left; perhaps the human was more resistant…either way, he had to trust the One called Archer. Degra strapped the mask to his face as he hit the deck, unconscious.

Archer was still coughing from the fake gas as he emerged from the simulator. Phlox greeted the captain immediately, giving him a shot of trioxide to clear Archer's brachial tubes; simultaneously, two medics entered the simulator, carrying hyposprays loaded with sedatives. "Degra should remain unconscious for at least two hours," the doctor explained before Archer could ask.

The journey to the command center was mercifully short, allowing the captain's taxed lungs a chance to recover as he reached the converted lab. Inside, he found the majority of his command staff—only Malcolm was on the bridge, watching for any incoming Xindi vessels.

"That son of a bitch designed the weapon!" Trip snarled immediately upon Archer's entrance. "You heard him admit it! Captain, it's time to drag his ass out of that simulator, and force the answers out of him!"

"At attention, Commander!" Archer barked sharply. The irate engineer, breathing heavily, snapped straight and tall. "If I'm looking for recommendations, I'll ask! Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," Trip muttered. His jaw was clenched tight.

It wasn't perfect, but Archer accepted it. "What have we got, T'Pol?"

"Biosensors detected no meaningful data when you mentioned Azati," the Vulcan replied. "However, by using several of his comments, Ensign Sato believes that she has finished compiling the last letter from his wife."

Archer turned to the linguist with a raised eyebrow. "What did you find, Hoshi?"

"At the time, his family was definitely in the Azati system," she answered. "It appears as though they had been there for some time."

"And how far away is the system?" Archer asked.

"Forty light-years," Travis answered. He had the starmaps displayed on the main monitor. "Given the navigational hazards, we're looking at five to six weeks travel time."

Archer grimaced as he looked at the map. "I don't suppose we can scan them for a weapons facility?"

"Not at this distance," T'Pol replied. "Weapons facilities usually give off unusual spectrographic readings, but the Azati star is too powerful. It would obscure them."

"And if you're relying on spectrographic readings, they'd be forty years out of date," Trip added, unclenching his jaw. "Not exactly reliable, if you ask me."

"This star could be a red herring," Travis pointed out. "We only know that his family was living there. It doesn't mean that the weapon was there."

"No, but Degra _is _a senior official," Archer explained. "He's the one designing the weapon, and with a project of that scope…there's a chance he'd keep his family close by."

"It's not unusual," Hoshi added. "Back on Earth, an entire residential town was built near the Los Alamos nuclear facility."

"But these are not humans," T'Pol countered. "You cannot expect them to follow human convention."

"Here's the thing, sir." Travis gestured to the star display. "We have three other restricted zones, all of which are much closer—but in different directions. If we _are _going to bypass them to go to Azati…I think we need something more." It was a bold statement for the junior-most officer to make, but it was greeted with a chorus of nods.

"You appear to have gained his trust," T'Pol noted. "Perhaps you should try a more direct approach."

"Like what?" Archer queried. He wasn't quite sure what she was leading to.

"Ask him where the weapon is being constructed."

"I don't think he trusts me _that _much," Archer replied. "And it's a hell of a risk: if we spook him, we'll end up right back where we started."

"Captain, there's always—" Trip started, before Archer's hand cut him off.

"No, Commander. At least…" Archer sighed. "At least, not yet. Let's give this a little more time."

When Degra woke up, his head hurt again; not so badly as the first time, but the coolant left him feeling dizzy and oddly thirsty. He quickly checked his recall; he didn't seem to have developed any new memory gaps, although there was something tautological about that conclusion.

As he climbed back to his feet, Degra realized that the One called Archer was in the cockpit again; somehow, the human had weathered the coolant leak. _Perhaps these humans are more robust than we thought. _Resistance to various types of gas was hardly constant across species, after all.

The deck plating suddenly shot out from beneath Degra, sending him crashing back to the floor as the shuttle leapt sideways. The violent movement knocked all thought about Archer's survival from Degra's mind. Rolling on the deck, he shouted forward to his companion. "What is it?!"

"Spatial anomalies!" Archer shouted back. "We're passing through a field of them!"

"Isn't the hull lined with trellium?" Degra yelled.

"Obviously not! Hang on—here comes another!"

"T'Pol to launch bay." The Vulcan's tones were prim and proper, despite the chaos she was watching on the viewing monitor. From the command center, she had a direct viewing link into the interior of the simulator; she watched in real time as Degra was tossed to the floor like a dirty rag.

"Tucker here."

"Increase hydraulics to level six."

"Level six, aye, sir." The shaking in the shuttle grew more pronounced as it plowed into a phantom anomaly.

T'Pol noted calmly that Degra had given up trying to regain his feet; instead, his arms were wrapped tight around the base of a seat, as he tried to keep his head away from hard surfaces. "Increase to level seven," T'Pol ordered.

Now, even Archer had to cling tight to his seat as the shuttle bucked its way through the spatial distortion; the clattering noises intensified until they overwhelmed all communication.

"On my mark," T'Pol commanded, "initiate a sharp jolt to starboard."

"How sharp?" Trip's voice, coming from outside the simulator, could barely be heard over the racket.

T'Pol thought for a split second before deciding that it was an on-site decision. "Sharp," she ordered, leaving it at Tucker's discretion.

"You heard the lady!" T'Pol's ears picked up Trip's comment to his technicians.

"Hoshi," T'Pol added, "let the captain know."

Ensign Sato nodded. "This is going to be a rough one, sir," she vocalized into his subdermal receiver.

A monstrous _thwack _sent the shuttle into a tail spin. Under the centrifugal force, Degra was ripped away from his clutch of safety and slammed, ass-first, into the opposite bulkhead; he was held in place, plastered halfway up the wall under the powerful forces pressing on him. His ears screamed and his head hurt as blood rushed and flowed to the point of farthest retreat; he forced himself to blink, trying to keep the moisture from ripping away.

Archer was nearly flung from his seat, and was saved only by Hoshi's momentary warning; he had alertly twisted the pilot's seat around behind him. Pinned against the backrest, he could still reach the controls; and with a grunting effort, he punched the necessary commands.

The powerful centrifuge slowed until drifting to a stop, seconds later. Degra crashed to the floor, where he rolled over delicately. "What happened?" he asked, grimacing.

"I took us out of warp," Archer replied, gasping for breath as his respiratory system rebounded from the intense pressure. "We were losing structural integrity. I think we're stuck in this field."

"Can't we get out?" Degra asked. Bracing his hands, he pushed himself to his feet.

"The field's too big," Archer replied, sagging back into the chair. "We don't have nearly enough fuel." He slowly rotated the chair so he could face the Xindi. "We have to send a distress call, Degra. One of your ships might be close enough to here it."

"And what if the insectoids pick it up?" Degra demanded with wheezing words.

Archer flipped his hands in surrender. "We don't have a lot of choices here. We're not getting out of here on our own."

Degra catalogued his options; they were few. If he believed this human, their best chance for escaping the anomaly field was to hope that a primate vessel was in the vicinity…if he didn't believe this human, then he lost nothing by playing along.

Degra spoke with a studied air of resignation. "There's a comm channel used by high-ranking primate officials," he offered. "I doubt the insectoids know about it." It wasn't a secured channel so much as it was a private one—it relied on anonymity, not encryption. But only a handful of ships in the entire Expanse would be looking for it.

"What's the frequency?" Archer asked. His hand was poised over the controls, ready to tap in the data.

"It would be easier for me to enter it directly," Degra observed. The human's reactions were as important as the comm data itself.

"Be my guest." Archer stood up and gestured for Degra to take the pilot's seat.

Confused by the expression, Degra took the offered chair. He made a point to shield his body as he tapped in the comm frequencies and codes; Archer drifted to the back of the cabin, making no effort to surreptitiously observe nor exaggerating an effort to look away.

_This isn't a dream. _Degra knew that, despite the surreal quality of everything about him. But it didn't quite feel like reality either; there was nothing that he could identify, no signs, no indicators, no firm evidence that anything was out of order. But something didn't _feel _right.

Back in the days when the Xindi still fought one another with sticks and stones, villages would erect false wooden palisades to emulate the walls of a fortified bastion. It was pure illusion, that only worked so long as it remained unchallenged; even the simplest of battering rams could topple the wood planks.

This experience had that same quality to it: all surface, and no substance. _Could I really just push over the walls?_

_Darkness imprisoning me  
All that I see  
Absolute horror  
I cannot live  
I cannot die  
Trapped in myself  
Body my holding cell_

Landmine has taken my sight  
Taken my speech  
Taken my hearing  
Taken my arms  
Taken my legs  
Taken my soul  
Left me with life in hell!

"Ensign?" The data stream scrolled before T'Pol's eyes as she spoke.

"I've got it, Commander," Hoshi responded absently. The young woman's focus was on her work; as the comm frequencies were fed into the simulator's computer, they were being simultaneously logged in Hoshi's console. She, T'Pol, and several others were still holed up in the command center, orchestrating the deceit taking place in the launch bay.

"Stand by to respond," T'Pol ordered. The response would not be immediate: it would be too fishy, too suspicious, to be credible. But it would not take days, either: they simply didn't _have _days to work with. T'Pol was already assembling a cover story to explain a momentary response.

"Bridge to command center." Malcolm Reed's voice intruded through the speakers. It had a worried quality to it; not unusual for the man tasked with the ship's defense, but Malcolm was a highly skilled officer. He would not have disturbed them for minor affairs.

"T'Pol here," the Vulcan replied. "Go ahead."

"We're picking up a distortion in subspace," Lieutenant Reed answered. "It looks like a Xindi ship just emerged from one of their subspace tunnels."

"How long until they arrive?" T'Pol queried.

"About six hours, Commander." The _Enterprise_had traveled away from the vortex to protect against this sort of thing, but there was only so much they could do.

"Commander." Hoshi looked up from her console. "Their sensors are pretty sophisticated—they'll see us long before then."

T'Pol raised an eyebrow partway in approval of Hoshi's judgment. "Lieutenant, take us back into the debris field," she ordered.

Malcolm's voice replied a moment later. "Please confirm, Commander. You want to re-enter the debris field? The radiation could overload our systems again."

"Confirmed, Lieutenant." T'Pol was not perturbed by the expressed concern; she would have done the same thing. "I'm aware of the risks. Carry out my orders."

"Acknowledged," Malcolm answered.

"Tell me about…Maarek Three," Archer suggested as he took another slug of the red whiskey. He and Degra were midway through the flask.

"What do you know about it?" Degra asked, slightly unsteady. The two men sat on the deck plating of the rear cabin, propped up against a bulkhead; with the shuttle marooned in a distortion field, awaiting rescue or death, there was little left to do.

"One of the inmates told me about it," Archer mused. In reality, Hoshi and Travis had plucked it from a navigation log to use as a conversation starter. "He said he used it as a staging area for smuggling dilithium."

Degra took the flask from Archer and tilted it back. It was beyond bizarre: here he was, sharing drink with the leader of the Destroyers. But his eyes had not yet turned to liquid fire, nor his tongue to molten gold, and the stench of the great fiery pits of the Furies did not yet tantalize his nose. "What did he say it was like?" Degra asked at last. His stomach, at least, _was _on fire.

"Beautiful," Archer replied softly, as though picturing the planet in his mind. "Tropical beaches that go on for thousands of kilometers, with bright green trees and shiny, warm sand. And if you go inland…tall, snow-capped mountains, with crystal lakes and brilliant blue skies."

"Is that where you want to go?" Degra asked.

"It sounded a lot like Earth, the way he described it," Archer answered. His voice was still far away, flying over the soaring heights of the towering mountain ranges. "When I get there, the first thing I'm going to do is find a cold lake, plunge in, and take the longest bath of my life."

"In a _cold _lake?" Degra shivered involuntarily. "My people could never do that. We prefer hot water—almost hot enough to scald us. As you can imagine, geothermal springs are quite popular."

"This colony of yours." Archer looked sideways at the primate. "You've never told me much about it."

"There's not much to tell," Degra observed. "It was bleak, desolate. It was like living on one giant lava plain—nothing but black rock all around you. Nothing to protect you from the sun." He handed the flask back to Archer. "The planet was scarcely even habitable."

Archer took a quick drink. "Why'd you live there?"

"You think it was by choice?" Degra chuckled bitterly. "I worked for the Xindi Council. They say go, you go. They say you're living at Azati, then you're living at Azati. They like to pretend that it's a choice, but…no Xindi defies the Council and lasts long."

"Not a good place for children," Archer observed.

Degra chuckled again. "They insisted that we bring our families along—for security, they said. _Their _security, yes; the Council was happy to keep our families under the point of the gun. Naara was so desperate to leave…" Degra's voice grew morose. "She didn't think a military habitat was the right environment for the children, but I was unwilling to take on the Council." He shook his head regretfully. "Do you have a family, Captain?"

Archer's attempt to smile was buried beneath his puckered expression; the liquor was rather nasty. "It's Jonathan, remember? You quit calling me 'Captain' two years ago."

"I wish I did remember…Jonathan," Degra replied, turning the name over in his mouth. It did feel familiar.

"I never really had an opportunity to start a family," Archer reflected. "I was away from home a lot—and life in the service is not conducive to having a family."

"You should make the time…Jonathan," Degra answered. He let his head fall to the side. "After all, a man without a family is no man at all."

"I guess I always considered my ship and my crew to be my family," Archer said. He handed the flask back to Degra. "There was a time when I would have left behind a legacy, at least."

"Our real legacy is our children," Degra answered. He righted his head and took a sip. "I've learned that our work, in the end, means very little. It's the _people _that we leave behind that matter."

"Well, my race _has _no people left," Archer replied bitterly.

"I'm sure that you would have done the same thing, had you been in my shoes," Degra said. He didn't really understand why he said it, but there it was. Was he looking for absolution? Agreement? Did he feel the need to explain himself? Or was he simply trying to fill a void?

"I would do anything to protect my family," the primate scientist continued. "After I was told of the threat from humanity, I left my theoretical studies to take over the weapon development program…I'm not a violent man, Jonathan, but I will fight to protect my family, and I was convinced that humanity would eventually exterminate the Xindi."

Degra tilted the flask back for another sip. "There was so much excitement when the prototype made it to your star system… we even channeled the telemetry into the Council Chamber itself. I watched it with the members of the Council. At one point, I even asked how many of the dead were children. The councilors told me not to worry—those were children that would not grow up to be our enemies." He shook his head. "I suppose I've told you this before."

"Only bits and pieces," Archer replied quietly.

"Three years," Degra said mournfully. "My children may not even recognize me after so much—"

His words were cut off by a shrill alert. Archer lurched to his feet. "We're being hailed!" The transmission buzzed and crinkled as Archer fell into the pilot's chair. "Whoever it is, they must be pretty far way. I'll try to clean it up!"

Degra staggered a half-step behind. "Can you identify it?" he demanded.

The words were faint and distorted, but intelligible. "—_peat—is Thalen—your distress call—acknowledge._"

"It's one of my colleagues!" Degra exclaimed excitedly. Given that only a half dozen primates had that particular comm frequency, they had stood a good chance of getting someone he knew. "Open a channel, Jonathan!"

"Will do," Archer promised as he tapped the controls.

"Thalen!" Degra leaned over the mic pickup. "Thalen, can you hear me? It's Degra!"

"_Degra? It's good to hear your voice! I'd heard from my sources that you had been executed!"_

"They haven't killed me yet," Degra promised. "But I need your help! My—friend and I have escaped from Azeyar. The insectoids are looking for us!"

"_I'm losing your signal. Please repeat."_

"Better make it fast," Archer said grimly. "I can't hold the contact much longer."

"Thalen, where are you?" Degra shouted.

"_I'm on Azati Prime. It's safe here."_

"Is my family still there? Are they safe? Thalen, answer me!" Degra demanded.

"_Naara is here, and the children." _Degra fell back in relief. "_I'll tell them to expect you. Do you…"_ The channel faded into gibberish.

"At least you know they're all right," Archer commented.

"I don't understand." Degra sunk into the copilot's seat in stunned disbelief. "There were more than a thousand primates and arboreals at that colony—it was a major facility! I don't understand why it wasn't destroyed!"

"Sometimes we shouldn't question the fortunes of war," Archer replied. "Who knows how many things could have happened? The important thing is, your family is okay."

"Yes, they are." The earlier sense of disconnect surfaced again in Degra's mind.

"We should change course," Archer offered. "Do you know the coordinates?" He caught the flinch of panic in Degra's face. "What's wrong?"

"You must forgive me…Jonathan," Degra replied slowly. "I still have a hard time seeing you as a friend, and not an enemy. Giving you the coordinates of a classified installation…"

"I understand." Archer gracefully stood up. "Why don't you enter them yourself?"

Shuffling seats, Degra took over the helm control and input the coordinates, adding several layers of encryption in the process.

Before Degra had quite finished, Archer spoke up again. "What will your people think when you show up with me? Do I need to be concerned about my safety?"

Degra thought carefully before shaking his head. "I doubt so, Jonathan. The conflict between our peoples is over, and neither the primates nor the arboreals are known to carry grudges. Besides, I'll tell them everything you did to help me—it may have been three years, but I'm still a senior official. My people will trust my judgment." _My still-undecided judgment._

"I appreciate that," Archer said softly.

"It's a diverse community, Jonathan," Degra replied. "They're used to having different species trickle through. It's far more pleasant than most—" The shuttle was slammed sideways with violent force.

T'Pol's voice took a scarce second to appear over the comm. "Commander Tucker?"

"Hang on a sec!" Trip shouted back. He was dashing madly between controls, yelling the words at the comm pickups. "Kelby, tell me something!"

"Port hydraulics are acting up, Commander!" Lieutenant Kelby replied from his control post. He, too, was moving frantically, tearing off panels and plunging his unprotected hands into the sparking circuitry.

"Shut them down!" Trip ordered. He came to a sliding stop beside Kelby, shoving his head in amidst the malfunctioning equipment.

"They're not responding!" Steeling his face, Kelby grabbed a bundle of wiring and yanked it from the receptors, but the clattering noise of the hydraulics continued to increase. The other units, contorted by the torque, were starting to complain with loud screeches and squeals; puffs of smoke began to appear as the equipment overheated in its battle to hold the simulator still.

"T'Pol to launch bay." In three years, Trip had never heard such urgency in T'Pol's voice—_well, maybe once or twice, _but not often. He pulled his head back, sprawling backwards before climbing to his feet.

"The radiation from the debris field is overloading the hydraulic system!" he shouted into the intercom. Two technicians dashed past, carrying fire suppressants; flames were shooting from one of the starboard units, and the fire alarms started blaring in loud, repeating howls.

"Can you stabilize the simulator?" T'Pol's voice was barely audible amid the racket.

A massive explosion ripped through the port hydraulic unit. Pieces of flaming wreckage sent the technicians scrambling for shelter, and in the smoke, Trip could see Kelby lying on the deck. Not moving, the lieutenant's torso was scorched black.

"I'm working on it!" Trip yelled, and he shut the intercom. He didn't need the distraction, not now. As the on-site medical team dashed to Kelby's aid, Trip found two pieces of non-conductive cloth to wrap around his hands, and he plunged into the sparking, broken machinery that nonetheless refused to die.

T'Pol watched the chaos unfolding on the monitors. From without, it looked like sheer chaos; crewmembers running to and fro, with several lying, unmoving, on the deck; flames and smoke ripping out from every hydraulics unit, clogging the air with vicious blackness more quickly than the ventilators could respond; shouted commands flying back and forth, trying to be heard above the all-encompassing racket; and in the middle, the simulator itself, rocking violently and out of control.

Within minutes, T'Pol knew, the simulator would rip itself from its supports, and after a final, cataclysmic boom, come to a rest. The occupants would emerge uninjured, but the illusion would be up. The logic flowed quickly.

_There's a Xindi ship on its way to investigate Degra's disappearance. Even with the protective halo of the system, we won't remain hidden long enough to start over. If we vacate the halo, it might hasten our discovery, but give us sufficient time to finish._

It was zero compared to maybe. An easy decision to make.

"T'Pol to the bridge," she called out, activating another comm channel.

"Reed here." The response was immediate.

"Take us out of the debris field," T'Pol ordered firmly.

"Understood, sir," Malcolm replied. His voice came back seconds later. "We're clear of the debris field, Commander."

"Acknowledged, Lieutenant." T'Pol closed the channel and shifted her attention back to the monitor.

"Don't be gentle!" Trip shouted to his fellow engineers. He had to tilt his head back to be heard; his torso was almost enveloped within the malfunctioning port unit. The power circuitry had been cut by raw force, yanked out as it was by hand; without power, the unit should have come to a dead stop, but it continued to buck and fight without relenting.

Out came another bundle of wiring, then another, followed by a still-hissing conduit severed from its hose clamps. _One of these, _Trip thought grimly, _has to do the job; _the radiation had undoubtedly caused a power surge within the equipment, and left behind a residual charge. He didn't have time to map it, so he would rip it out instead.

Well-trained by this point, Degra rapidly found the handholds needed to pull himself erect and maintain his stance, even as the shuttle bucked ferociously beneath his feet. The One called Archer had already scrambled into the pilot's chair, and even with his gaze half-blocked, Degra could see the human moving frantically to stabilize the craft. "More anomalies?" Degra shouted out, more for reassurance than for information.

"I'm not sure," Archer yelled back. Degra's brow furrowed sharply; something about the captain's answer didn't sound quite…right. It was off somehow, but the primate couldn't put a finger on it.

_The captain is more panicked this time, _Degra realized. There was an added note of fear in the human's voice that had not been present before. It was reasonable; this distortion wave seemed to be worse than the others…but now, Degra figured out what had felt so wrong. The floating sense of dissonance that he had carried since first waking up was not in error. _The captain wasn't afraid before now._

Trip let himself slump back to the deck, the charged adrenaline draining from his body. Either he had severed the right connection, or the power surge had burned out; either way, the port unit sputtered to a feeble death. With its end, the other units—no longer twisted and torn—settled down, easing back into normal operations. Rattles resounded from the tortured equipment, but the simulator was once again flying normally.

_Fluke, not fate, powers the universe. _The Writings of Manacala, Analect Forty-Six.

As the turbulence slowed and stuttered to a halt, Degra turned his head to the nearest viewport. He didn't know what he expected to see; nothing, really, he supposed. It would just do him good to see the quivering stars settle back into their fixed places within the firmament.

It was a flicker.

The shuttle was traveling at sublight speed; thus the stars, located hundreds and thousands of light-years distant, should remain relatively stable. But before Degra's eyes—for a single second—the pinpoints of light leapt into the familiar, elongated blur of warp speed.

Understanding crashed into Degra's mind.

"What was the problem?" he asked carefully, turning back to the Destroyer.

The human seemed to think before responding. "Subspace turbulence."

_Yes, _Degra realized. _Something unplanned happened. It rattled this human. It knocked him from his script, and now he's fumbling. _"I'm curious, Jonathan," Degra said slowly. "If we've been friends for as long as you say, I must have told you the names of my children."

T'Pol and Hoshi watched the monitor closely, unwilling to tear their gaze away. They were viewing the simulator cabin itself, courtesy of a network of hidden cameras; there was the captain, seated in the pilot's chair, spun backwards to face Degra. And there was Degra, standing in the rear of the cabin, his body language shifting suddenly.

Both officers knew how to read nonverbal cues—Vulcans learned because of their own finally controlled body movements, and as for Hoshi, it was a staple of linguistics and translation.

"_You still don't believe me," _Archer was saying. He spread his hands slowly to show his good intentions. "_If I wanted to harm you, I could have long before now."_

"Commander." Hoshi's spine stiffened as she caught the shadowy half-movement behind Degra's back. "There's something in his hand."

"_I'm sure I would have told you," _Degra repeated. He took a slow step forwards.

"_It's been years since you said anything," _Archer remarked.

"Magnify," T'Pol ordered. Hoshi zeroed in on the small of Degra's back; it was cloaked in shadow, but there, in his left hand, he was definitely holding something. Degra had been searched for weapons before the simulation began…but if properly used, various parts of the simulator itself could be converted into old-fashioned shanks. In the chaos, no one had watched him closely enough.

T'Pol opened a channel to Archer's receiver. "Captain, he has a weapon."

"_I just need you to tell me what their names are," _Degra repeated. He took another step forward, and lowered his left hand slightly; he was bringing the shank around.

"We're coming in," T'Pol spoke into the captain's head.

"_This isn't necessary," _Archer said, the message going both to Degra and T'Pol. "_I thought we trusted each other."_

"_Their names, Captain," _Degra replied.

"Piral and Jaina," Hoshi whispered.

"_Piral and Jaina," _Archer repeated. "_Their names are Piral and Jaina. See? We've become friends, Degra!"_

"_Which one is older?" _Degra asked suspiciously.

Archer's back stiffened; Hoshi's blood ran cold; T'Pol felt an uncharacteristic shudder ricochet through her body. During their preparatory sessions, certain basic facts could not be found; the reconstructions from Degra's computers were incomplete. There was nothing the _Enterprise_crew could do about it, except hope that Degra didn't ask the questions…

"_Which one is older?"_ Degra said, more vehemently this time. He stepped forward again, reaching the midpoint of the simulator's cabin; his grip on the shank shifted slightly, as he prepared to bring it forward in a slashing motion.

"_We don't have to do this, Degra," _Archer replied, scrambling for a way out. "_We've been through too much to play these games."_

Degra knew he was on the scent. "_Tell me now, Captain. Which one is older?" _The primate's patience was gone. He needed an answer, now, and it was evident to everyone involved.

When the girls were listed together, Piral's name was typically first. Archer figured that it gave him 55-45 odds. "Piral."

Degra's arm sliced forward as he launched himself at the captain, leading with the sharpened edge of his weapon. In the control center, T'Pol hit the hotwired emergency alarm, barking the age-old command: "_GO-GO-GO!"_

The walls of the simulator buckled under the assault of heavy boots as six MACOs burst in, catching Degra in the midst of his leap. The pointed blade swept forward, scoring a path down Archer's torso, slicing his prisoner garb and ripping a bloody path from his chest bone to his abdomen, and the captain sprawled backwards, falling from his chair.

The commandos seized the Xindi by every limb, dragging him through the slumping walls of the simulator until they tossed to the deck of the launch bay, where he landed with a resounding thud. Behind them, Dr. Phlox led the charge of medics within to tend to their injured captain.

"Let me at the bastard!" Trip shouted in fury as he ran across the bay. "Let me at him!" Major Hayes motioned for the commandos to step back and clear a path for the seething commander.

Before Degra could roll over, Trip was on him, screaming obscenities from three different planets. "You murdering bastard!" he repeated, as he rolled Degra onto his back.

Wrathfully, Trip dragged the primate to his feet, hands clenched on the chest of Degra's tunic. "_WHERE'S THE WEAPON?" _he shouted, letting spittle fly in Degra's face. "_WHERE'S THE DAMN WEAPON, YOU MURDERING BASTARD?"_

Degra sputtered a few times, fear etched across his face, but no answer came out. Snarling furiously, Trip started pushing the Xindi backwards across the open space; with the medics busy attending to the captain, and the commandos holding back, there was no one to stop him. Moments later, they reached the bulkhead, and Trip slammed Degra into it with full force.

Degra felt himself go woozy from the impact as his head crashed into the metal, and in front of him, the face of the Destroyer blurred into two, then four; it grew long, then wide, its eyes shifting colors throughout the spectrum as they spat out hatred. His terror was palpable, and he felt frozen in his boots before the onslaught. _This is the end, _his mind kept repeating. _This is the end._

"You think you're going to get away with this?" Trip snarled. He brought his face close, breathing hot air into Degra's nose. "You think you're going to stop us? Your little attack left _me _unscathed, you putrid piece of _shit_!"

Trip was aware little now, save the rushing blood that cloaked his hearing and turned his vision red. Somehow, it fit: this arch-murderer, this anti-life standing before him, drenched in the blood of death. The rush of blood transmuted in Trip's mind; now he could hear the hollowed screams of seven million people, destroyed on a spring day, their bodies ripped apart by the enduring fire of the Xindi.

_Every death is a right to hate_. The mantra gave Trip the energy to live, the energy to keep going in this deadened world. "Only one of us will walk away!" Trip screamed, close enough to bite off the bastard's nose. "Only one of us!"

Degra staggered against the bulkhead, his thoughts growing weary and confused. The lights dimmed, then recovered, before blinking off; for a moment, he was outside, then back inside.

"What is this, a joke to you?!" Trip demanded as he slammed the Xindi against the bulkhead again. "_Where is the damned weapon?" _He was running out of ways to hide from the rage, but no longer cared. It thrived under his skin, gave him drive, gave him energy.

Trip yanked Degra away from the bulkhead and pushed him through a nearby hatchway into the access corridor. The primate staggered as he marched backwards; his head dangled about his neck, and his eyes rolled mercilessly, but still Tucker pressed. "_Where's the weapon?"_ Trip demanded. "_Where's the damn weapon!"_

The Xindi had taken all his love, and left Trip living in his own hate. Now, there was no reason left to hold back; he had his hands on the arch-murderer, and there was not a thing anyone could do. _I am the push that makes you move, _Trip thought as the unending rage surfaced, consuming everything else. _I am the push that makes you move!_

The staggering march continued down the corridor. Degra stumbled and tripped, his limbs barely functioning; only half-aware, his conscious mind was frozen into paralysis by the Destroyer's onslaught. In his panic, he couldn't even recall the weapon he was being interrogated about.

At the end of the access corridor, the two foes went through a double set of doors, into the EV staging area located behind the launch bay. Tucker had his mind set on something very particular; and as they continued their awkward march, Degra dimly realized that they were approaching an airlock.

"_Tell me where the damned weapon is!" _Trip repeated, his words snarling with their own palpable hate. "_Where is it!"_

No answer—no words, other than a few mewling whispers—came forth, and Trip hit the controls to open the inner airlock. No one else was with them; no one to stop him. He was going to get the information, and then he would have his rightful vengeance. That he could accomplish both simultaneously…it was a sign that his cause was just.

Degra fell backwards into the airlock, and the inner hatch _whooshed _shut. Now, finally, his senses snapped out of their paralysis, as the realization of his impending death crashed down. He could already hear the hiss of evacuating atmosphere; the voice of the Destroyer, repeating the same question over and over, began to grow faint.

"_WHERE'S THE WEAPON?! WHERE IS THE WEAPON?"_ Trip kept shouting, pounding his fists to emphasize the fury. The arch-murderer had to be suffering by now; as the atmosphere vented out, the gases inside the being's body would expand gradually. Rather than the sudden explosion associated with rapid decompression, Degra's body would undergo intense, debilitating pain as every cell expanded and pressed outwards.

Trip howled with shock as Degra's body disappeared into a transporter beam.

"How's it coming?" Archer's face was strained and pale, but with Phlox's assistance, he fell into one of the office chairs that populated sickbay. The captain's torso was wrapped with bandages, and in best Starfleet tradition, he had a standard-issue navy-blue bathrobe. The cut had been severe, but not life-threatening.

"Travis has a team working on Degra's ship," T'Pol reported. It had been her quick-thinking—triggered by the video link to the launch bay—that sent her dashing down D-deck to the transporter alcove. "We're making it appear as though they came too close to the debris field, and suffered random systems failures. A ruptured plasma conduit will explain their unconsciousness."

"I'm injecting them with trace amounts of plasma," Phlox added. "Not enough to be harmful, but it will help verify the cover story."

"Captain." T'Pol's momentary hesitance, rather than a change in tone, betrayed her concern. "This accident won't explain how their computer core was deleted."

"As long as they don't know _we _did it." Archer's words were quiet and slow, but quite lucid. "They'll have to write it off to the system failures. How's Degra?"

"I was able to stabilize him," Phlox replied. His mien was unusually serious. "Commander T'Pol was able to retrieve him before serious damage occurred. What little is left can be handled by his own physicians."

"Captain…" T'Pol required a prod before she continued. "Captain, I currently have Commander Tucker confined to his quarters, pending your orders."

Archer tried to nod, but his head sagged instead. "Leave him there for now, T'Pol," he answered softly. "I'll get to it…when I feel stronger. How soon until we depart?"

"The Xindi vessel is less than an hour away, Captain," T'Pol replied. "Our teams should be finished shortly."

"As soon as they're done, get us out of here, T'Pol." The captain had to draw a breath before continuing. "Put us on course for Azati Prime."

_Two days later_

"You wanted to see me, sir?" Trip stuck his head through the doorway, but kept the remainder of his body outside.

Captain Archer, still wrapped in his bathrobe, sat in the seldom-used conference room. He had the lights out; even the night-friendly luminescent strips were off, leaving only the passing glow of stars to illuminate the room. The captain was more a black hole than anything, blotting out an area of space against the star field. "Have a seat, Commander," he said quietly.

Trip stayed still for a second before willing himself to move. He crossed the room, one step at a time, feeling the suffocating, stale silence as he approached. A chair was already positioned for him, and slowly, he took a seat.

"Sir, I—" Trip began.

"Stow it." Archer cut him off. The captain's words may have been faint, but they were still as strong as steel. "I don't know what to do with you, Trip," he said. "I really don't know." Trip knew enough to stay silent.

"I remember when you were fresh into Starfleet," Archer continued. "Never afraid to challenge the status quo. Did you know that Admiral Forrest himself had to intervene to get you off from a couple disciplinary charges? He thought that, with a little seasoning, you could become one of the best." Archer smiled in the darkness. "He was rather grateful when I asked for you as my chief engineer."

Archer sighed. "The point is this, Trip: I could lock you in the brig, but that wouldn't accomplish much. You're allowing your potential to waste away beneath your hate and vengeance."

"I know, Captain," Trip replied morosely. "But the thing is…sometimes, the rage is all I know. It's all I have left."

"You need something positive, Trip," Archer answered. "You used to love life."

"I know," Trip answered. "It's just…not easy."

"Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent," Archer stated by rote.[1]

"So you're not taking me off-duty?"

Archer sighed again. "I can't. I need you too much."

"Captain." Trip hesitated before continuing. "What will happen…_when _we get back?"

"A court-martial, no doubt," Archer replied. "If you're lucky, they'll rule that it's a medical matter."

"Captain…would we still be having this conversation if Degra had told me where the weapon is?"

Archer watched the stars for several seconds before answering. "Some things are always wrong, Trip, no matter the circumstances. We don't engage in moral or situational relativism. It's not what the human race does—at least, it's not what we aspire to."

The captain leaned forward to admire a star burst. "When did we slip off the cliff, Trip?" he asked quietly.

"With all due respect, sir, I think we went charging over at full speed."

"There has to be a better way than this," Archer replied. "There has to be."

* * *

[1] Calvin Coolidge.


End file.
